hcg


30 years of keyboarding

IBM Model M Keyboard

30 years of keyboarding and mousing. Green screens to GUI environments. SSP to DOS, Windows and Linux. RPG to Basic, Pascal, C, Perl and PHP. Heavy technical manuals to Google. Netscape to Mozilla. Dumb terminals to personal computers and tablets. Punch cards and 8 inch diskettes to USB thumb drives. 10MB to Terabyte hard drives. 640K ought to be enough. All nighters to repetitive stress injuries. Drag and drop to carpal tunnel syndrome. Folding tables to ergonomic desks. Hard plastic chairs to Herman Millers. Cubicles to home offices.

10 FOR X = 1 to 30
20 PRINT "Bert's been computing for "; X;
30 IF X = 1 THEN PRINT " year" ELSE PRINT " years"
40 NEXT X

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been