Amazed at it all

Very interesting. And a bit sad. Maybe it's a reversible trend.

 

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hey Mac McDonald and welcome to CT. dont get down on yourself for learning the in's and out's here at CT. everyone has been there. good luck friend

 

There is a crack Mac Technician that lives 80 miles east of here on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain who can do just about anything. He is about 10 years younger than me so he is reaching that age when he might soon be telling me that he can't take the trips anymore. I pay him well to come help me.

My biggest fear is that in this age of computerized communications, I will be unable to receive statements and pay bills. All I get are computers that tell me I have at least a 45 minute wait to speak with a real person. The Humana Pharmacy told me to get off the phone and use my computer to contact them. I replied that their site blocked me from logging on so they just hung up on me.

 

Just the opposite here. I started with a company-supplied Zenith DOS notebook in the mid-eighties. We were told to run a program every Friday afternoon that would download the week's activities onto a floppy disk which would then be mailed to the home office. When people would see me sitting at a restaurant counter drinking coffee while working on this POS they would ask, "What program are you using?" I would answer, "Wordperfect, my favorite command is F-7."

I bought one of the original Macs in 1984, did a lot of study on what was available for it and soon after developed my own set of marketing programs and forms using Microsoft's flat "File", Word and, at the time, Multiplan. This really p!$$ed off the computer guys who had been hired to do the rote things that required a simple data transfer to disk once a week. The crowd oohed and ahhed at what I showed them. Of course, I was still required to use one of those awful Zenith laptops, then jumped for joy when the Marketing Department admitted that they could not achieve what they needed so the program was abandoned and the machines requested to be returned. Al Gore's invention had not come into full use yet. Enter the original Windoze wherein adopters could say I have a mouse too, and I have more games than you.

Thirty-seven years later I am still running a Mac, although, at times in the late 90s I bought a few Windows machines, promptly sending them to my brother who never learned to take it easy.

 

Hi Mac
Per our conversation now would be a good time for the call
Stay safe

 

If you don't keep up with time, the only thing that changes is your age. We will do our best to assist you. Welcome to CT and good luck...

 

I was running offline peripherals back in 1973 that created tapes that went to mainframe computers for processing. Continued on that path to becoming a computer operations supervisor at the county. Didn't personally get an IBM compatible computer until 1995 running Windows 3.11. Before then I went from a VIC20 to a C64 and used both of them to get online with my 300 baud modem.

I'm now on Windows Vista on a Dell laptop I bought in 2008 and have no plans to change anytime soon.

 

Welcome @Mac McDonald, and so glad to have another tech-dummy on board. I've gotten help from CTers, kids and grandkids. We're almost contemporaries, along with many others on here.

@jeffB, I always pictured you as a guy in his late 40's to mid-50s. Am I that far off?

Steve

 

Well, if you've always pictured me that way, you were right.

58 next month. Not really feeling it yet, though. Or at least not admitting it.

 

You'll be fine until age 60. That's when life changes. Lol

 

My first computer was a slide rule. I am so old that I can remember when there were only four chemical elements (earth, air, fire, and water). I collect ancients too. My granddaughter says like attracts like.
Mac McDonald - enjoy the crazy.
JeffB - amen, brother. I am the chair of a small board of a voluntary organization. We have a website. I got my granddaughter (adult) to do some of the work on it and we had a big argument. I wanted to post all six pages of our bylaws as one document. She said she learned in Graphic Design that most people don't want to deal with something so long. She wanted to have three separate pages. So long? Really? I can see avoiding Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (six volumes) but six pages?

 

I get the old part. When I graduated from high school the 7th graders were the first to be allowed to use calculators in class. Oh yeah, and there was no middle school at that time.

 

And that first calculator? Probably same as mine, the Bowmar Brain. With all four of its 'advanced' calculating functions +, -, ×, ÷

 

They were very basic but that's all I remember about them.

 

Most people don't want to deal with six pages of bylaws, period, whether they're presented as one document, or separate pages, or separate paragraphs.

Those who do want to deal with them will almost certainly be glad to get them in one chunk. You're not trying to grab eyeballs here, you're trying to make a resource available.

At least, that's what I would have argued to her.

 

Welcome to the forum! Not alone there in the computer department, a lot of us still like to use computers for simple online use.

I do own an android phone but do not like to use these for internet browsing functions (just to call someone). I have been using laptops since 2007 to go on forums/message boards and that will never change. There are still a lot of people that use computers believe me, in fact they even make computers with touch screens now (but I specifically look for ones that don't). Didn't have my first smart phone until just 2 years ago and I am a millennial, so I had one of those flip phones for a chunk of my adult life

 

I juggle mixed categories. I like my US Morgan Dollars and others from the time period, sometimes I find myself buying others around the world, whether they be modern, obsolete or even ones you can spend right now in their adjacent nations. More recently I've grown a liking to searching types of serial numbers on our paper money. If an interesting one comes up I keep it.

 

Correct.

 

Believe me when I say I understand

 

I had this vascular guy tell me that he could make me feel like a kid again. A month after the operation he figured he should make my good leg like the other one so a week before Christmas, I had my second vascular surgery in as many months. I have needed to use a walker ever since but the pain is still there. Like my wife keeps telling me, "Doctors bury their mistakes."