A Couple of Memories to Ponder

I was watching a segment on the news tonight about flu shots, and I had one of those flashbacks to early youth. Usually it's some smell that triggers that, like the smell of grass, or wet pavement, but tonight it was an image of a flu shot.

When I was about six or seven, I had a deep hatred of hypodermic needles. I was a really bad patient, and sometimes people had to hold me still, and the shots were painful. At some point, I convinced myself to stop being such a brat and take my shot like a man. (An eight year old man.) The strangest thing happened. The doctor gave me the shot, and it didn't hurt! Without the struggling, the tension, and the overactive imagination, the shot wasn't so bad. It was the anticipation of pain that made it so much worse. (You women who've had children have been taught this in birthing class already.)

It amazes me that I still have this memory, lo these many decades later. So what? you ask. People all over the world have memories from their childhood. But think about it: What's the oldest file on your computer? There are hundreds of files that I'll never see again, because the disk crashed, got corrupted, got lost, or became an obsolete format. I still have 5 1/4 inch floppies. I don't think I have any machines left that will read them. Wanna hear something really crazy? I still have 8 inch floppies. I'll never see those files again.

Thinking about it, I came to remember which file is the oldest one I have. Somewhere in my home office, Fibber McGee's office, there is a roll of yellow paper punch tape. For those of you who don't know that Paul McCartney had a band before Wings (Paul who?), once upon a time computers could save files onto a long inch-wide strip of paper. Deep in the bowels of my office is a paper tape with the game of Qubic (3d tic-tac-toe) saved as source code in the BASIC language, from the year 1973. That's my oldest computer file. And I could probably still read it, if I dug up my old Oliver Audio Paper Tape Reader.

How about you? What's your oldest file?


Blog Tag: Chatter