Category: Childhood
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Stacks & Stacks
When I was eleven, there was a big Monet show at the Art Institute of Chicago. I was part of the tsunami of school kids poured into yellow buses and shipped to the big city to see it. Our art teacher talked up the Monet paintings. A new one had been acquired and it was quite…
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Liminal Christmas
Back in the 1960s and 70s, before everyone and their uncle had Christmas lights and inflatable eye candy – the electrical holiday treat was animatronics at the mall. Our mall was no exception. There were animals and small human-like creatures who might have been dressed in Victorian clothing that populated the winding path to Santa.…
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TOPO talk to me
The summer I turned ten, I went to a week long computer camp at the high school. The computers were Apple IIe and the language was LOGOS. It was super fun. There was something special at the end of camp. It was a robot. A REAL robot!! When I was a kid, robots in my…
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Leisure Suit Larry
Our beige computer sat in the corner of the TV room on the desk that ran the width of the room, butteressed on the left end with a refinished lovely wood file cabinet. It sat in the corner just shy of the front windows. The beige computer replaced the TI-99. I thought it was an…
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Prodigal Sears
In a prominent location facing out from an end cap sat a TI-99 display at Sears. My brother and I always got sucked into its gravitational pull. We’d play games then badger whichever parental unit was with us to purchase said game. The mall was a decent distance from our house and we didn’t go…
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My Aunty Bell
As I said before, my dad worked for Western Electric at Montgomery Works. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T until the divestiture in 1984. His location manufactured telephone parts and data transmission equipment. He tested equipment during his tenure there. I remember visiting him at the plant once during a strike. I…
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Sturdy construction and great conversational sound quality
As I mentioned in my prior post, my dad worked at Western Electric in Montgomery Works back in the day. Before the great divestiture of Ma Bell, Western Electric was a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T. It was a long-lived electrical engineering and manufacturing company founded in 1869. While Montgomery Works evolved to focus on data…
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Radio Shack …
As I’ve dug around in my memory banks, one thing eluded me. I didn’t remember where my dad bought his tech supplies from. I remember the Computer Shopper catalog. I remember playing games on the TI display at Sears at the mall which was about a 30 minutes drive from our house. I…
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Return of the Electric Typewriter
For half of my senior year of high school, I was without the family computer as it had moved to Colorado with my family. I had to use my mom’s electric typewriter and lots of whiteout. I’d take it out of its hard plastic case and set it up on Grandma’s dining room table and…
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Pizza & Pac Man
My first arcade game was at Pizza Hut and it was a cocktail table Pac Man game. It sat by the emergency exit door, on the path to the bathroom. It was a treat to play it. I wasn’t good at it but played it with my brother or family friends. On Friday nights, we…
code & carrot 