I'm not allowed to get rid of it, for some reason.

Does Mike think he'll be able to sell it as an antique some day?

And, okay, the receptionist guy left for, like, a minute, and I just got bombarded with people asking me for departments and deliveries.

Like, guys? I didn't even know where the printer paper was this morning.

Dad repurposed all our old macs (and some work ones too) so they could be used unofficially in the schools, with mom as the distributor. Some of them are still out there. I still have my 1996 laptop, but I won't ditch that until I figure how to get stuff off it an onto my current one. It's ...nontrivial.

We always had PCs at home (because we'd get the old computers from my Dad's law firm whenever they upgraded) and Apples at school (because of that "Apples for students" grocery points program). I remember learning to program in Logo and Basic. (For values of "program" which include "make the triangle thing which for some reason was called a turtle move three inches to the left")

And then in middle school we learned to program using Hypercards, which I thought were stupid and pointless.

(When Steve Wozniak was on the Colbert Report a few weeks ago, the lower third during the intro segment said "10 NAIL 20 GOTO 10" and I laughed and laughed and laughed. And then I wondered how many of his audience missed it completely because Comedy Central skews young?)

I've never worked on either an Apple or a Mac. Not that I'm a PC snob (is there such a thing?), but Apple/Macs were just never in use anywhere I worked or by any family members.

For values of "program" which include "make the triangle thing which for some reason was called a turtle move three inches to the left"

Me too!

sarameg's angry cardinal is cracking me up. Do you think he brought the surplus chick cardinals to lure the rival cardinal out of his shiny palace?

C64, baybee! But I did give it away, eventually, to another geek who would treasure it and revere it and program it in BASIC. For a while we were a veritable museum of pc progress and owned one in every stage. But since then, the revolution came, and we've gradually pawned off all our gear on eager, unsuspecting relatives who wanted on this highway thingie they'd all heard about.

Of course, they had the last laugh, because now the extent of our relationship with said relatives is that we receive their service calls.

Does Mike think he'll be able to sell it as an antique some day?

No, I think it's "I still have programs that work on it!"

The Windows 3.1 machine and Windows 95 machine are in our bedroom.

(For values of "program" which include "make the triangle thing which for some reason was called a turtle move three inches to the left")

I could totally make a square! I rule at programming.

Do you think he brought the surplus chick cardinals to lure the rival cardinal out of his shiny palace?

Hee! He's certainly more secure in his,um...redness than he was in earlier seasons. Less unrestricted flinging rage and more deadly intent. In other words, he's not flinging himself quite as incessantly and violently at the window, but he's glaring at it and pecking a lot more.

It was called a turtle because that's what the robot looked like. When my team won the London finals of the British Computing in Schools competition, a turtle robot was our prize. It had a long ribbon cable as tether, and you set it down in the middle of the floor on a piece of paper, and threw your Logo at it.