Tuesday December 20, 2005

It Sounds Like a Modem Connecting

Speaking of the crummy technology we have endured, Andrew Hearst has posted his notes from a sixth-grade class presentation he gave about his TRS-80 computer back in 1980. They’re awesome—especially to anyone who ever put a data cassette in a tape deck to find out what data “sounds like.”

I saw Andrew re-create this presentation at the Little Gray Books lecture series a few years ago, and while he didn’t get the laughs he got for his middle school oral report on the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods, the TRS-80 speech was almost profound. 1980 just wasn’t that long ago. I’m about Andrew’s age and every day I work in a medium that didn’t even exist when I was in college. Here’s young Andrew on data storage:

Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy. Instead of using a tape recorder, though, you use what’s called a disk drive, which is a box that you slide the disk into. It is much, much faster than using tapes.

Yes. Much faster.