I have to come out about something.
I’m not straight.
But I don’t know what to call myself. Maybe you can help me.
I don’t know the word for what I am, besides old.
I’m so old I don’t know what things mean anymore.
I’m so old I think a tranny is a part of car.
I’m so old I think three-way refers to an intersection.
I’m so old I think that LGBTQ could be a really fancy sandwich (maybe LettuceGoudaTomatoBaconQuiche. (why anyone would put quiche in a sandwich is beyond me, but these are modern times. Stranger foods have appeared on the Web. And in books))
I’m so old that I was surprised to find there were THREE genders of bathroom in Crown College at UC Santa Cruz (and Crown is the most practical of the UCSC colleges, supposed to produce engineers and scientists. Porter is the arts college, they may have more than three )
I’m so old that I don’t know if PC is short for Politically Correct (ideology), Personal Computer (as opposed to mainframe), or type of operating system (MAC vs PC)
In the last sense, the sense of operating system, I am definitely bi. I have an Apple laptop, and a PC desktop. I go both ways.
I HAVE to. It’s who I am.
Perhaps I was born this way.
When I started with computers, they were not separated by operating systems, just sizes and programming languages, and we learned to type, not to keyboard. There was carbon paper. There was corrasable paper, and White-Out was on every desk next to the stapler.
I was an early adopter, mainframe gal. In high school, I could go to the Gandalf terminal in the guidance office, set the “dip switches” to the prescribed settings, and did what I needed to do on monochrome screens. I punched cards for the IBM 360, and the card punching device had its own room. In college, I opened up my free student account at Columbia Computing Center and used EMACS to write programs whose output was printed out on paper that had green and white lines and holes on the sides. Offices had IBM Selectrics with magnetic card systems added in the early ‘80s.
I edited a magazine called the Atari Explorer in 1984, and wrote an article on word processing programs for Personal Computers called ‘Throw Out the White-Out.’ My PCs were were IBM compatible—Jack is famous for striking a flat-rate deal with Bill Gates for the Commodore operating systems.
Our house was strictly ‘IBM Compatible,” or what came to be called “PC” till 2002, when against my husband’s wishes, I bought my younger son an Apple Ibook when he was in 6th grade. All his friends had one, and I wanted him to be normal.
I had it shipped to a friend’s house and picked it up there. Imagine my surprise when I unwrapped the little white thing and discovered that it was solid and compact, and could probably survive being run over with a car.
It was a well-made thing. It was darling. It had smooth corners. I fell in love with it. Then I gave it to my younger son to take to school, and went back to working on the husband-approved computer – an HP desktop with it AMD processor . I don’t remember if we still called them clones then. When we traveled in 2004, Mike’s ibook is the machine we took along to store our pictures
In 2006 eldest son got a job at the Apple store and to support him, I bought a Macboook of my own. But just for something on the side. Then I got his old IPhone. Then a MacBook Pro. And now I’m in really deep.
