Now I'm really not that old (we had an Apple IIe when I was in second grade), but I thought I'd share....

In life before computers;

An application was for employment,
A program was a TV show,
A cursor used profanity,
And a keyboard was on a piano!

Memory was something that you lost with age,
And a CD was a bank account;
And if you had a corrupted disk,
It would hurt when you found out!

Compress was what you did to garbage,
Not something you did to a file;
And if you unzipped anything in public,
You'd be in jail for a while!

Log on was adding wood to a fire,
A hard drive was a trip on the road,
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived,
And a backup happened to the commode!

Cutting, you did with a pocket knife,
Pasting, you did with glue.
The Web was where a spider lived,
And a virus was the flu!

Life Was Good Back Then

....I miss my Apple IIe

Life without computers would mean no BOL!!!

What life?

[Sticking my fingers in my ears, closing my eyes and loudly repeating]NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA I don't hear you. NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA

Is it just me, or does this "before computers" thread take a really, really, long time to load.

Saw a prototype 'tabletop' computer at a trade show in 1971. The salesman predicted it was the future of computers. Our head DP guy (a mainframer) was there with me - - he just snickered and walked away. An historic moment.

Ken, he was not alone. It is reported that the president of IBM one day, said there might be a need for one or two computers in the world. He didn’t think there was a need for them in the home.

Sorry Bonnieta...it's you hun

there were once no computers???

I remember when it was wonderful that IBM made those "selectric" typewriters that would correct your typing by backspacing over it with whiteout ribbon! I remember loading code into one of the first PCs in order to make sure the margins and spacing were correct and thinking that this was so wonderful because we wouldn't have to type the same form over and over again! Things have changed a lot in my 29 years of banking!

i remember the whiteout ribbon!!!

I can remember typing and retyping my papers in college because there was no way to correct an error other than whiteout and that wasn't allowed. One mistake and you started all over. And I'm not sure, but I think it was a manual typewriter that I was using. We've come a long way!!!!

do you remember the typing erasers with the plastic brush thing on the other end? they did nothing but rip a hole in the paper?

I remember using word perfect and Lotus 123... yikes.

I remember those as well - and DOS. Loved those DOS commands

c:/exit

^^^^ really old ^^^^

and Supercalc!

What about erasable pens? Sweet smudgers of the handwritten world.

The Selectric was the best typewriter ever made.