the good old days

When I was young(er), one of my favorite Washington, DC sites was the Smithsonian Museum of American History's Information Age: People, Information and Technology exhibit. I wish I had more personal photographs to post for you- it was spectacular (as far as I know it's no longer there, although I haven't visited since graduating from American University in 2000). The exhibition took you through the history of computers and technology, and went backwards through time- you started out in the present with small laptops and walked through until you were in a room at the end with ENIAC- where practically the entire room was a computer.

They had an early XEROX copier, first introduced in 1959, weighing 650lbs:

I was lucky enough to grow up with computers- my grandfather worked in the security industry. Gramps started a central station which monitored alarms and dispatched the appropriate service (police, EMT, fire, etc). King Central had a room filled with headset-donned telephone operators, and all the calls were routed by and recorded to rows and rows of computers in a back room. When I was a kid, we had computers in the house. My uncle Glenn was an early Apple adopter, and at my house over the years (from gifts and hand-me-downs) we had an Apple IIe, IIc, IIGS, and Commodore 64. We even had some early Radio Shack Tandy models. (Not this one, but one like it, which couldn't handle lower-case letters!)

I used to take them apart, look at all the parts, and put them back together. I remember doing this on the kitchen floor at my grandparents' house and my grandfather coming home from work in dismay thinking I'd broken it. But he realized soon that it wasn't just playing for me- I had a knack, and he was smart enough to foster it.