Just saw a commercial for the Lenovo laptops. The commercial shows a cup of soda spilling onto the keyboard of the traveling businessman’s laptop. He just picks up the cup and blots the keyboard dry with a table napkin. So, how did they do that? I’ve seen laptop keyboards from underneath and can’t figure out how they would make the keyboard spillproof.
One of the things about Facebook that is unique but also puzzling for newbies is the Poke. I don’t really know what they intended when they put the Poke on there. I never thought that poking was polite – its a way to get attention but its so rude to do that in real life. I can’t remember the last time I would have poked anyone in real life. I think I might have gotten slapped or punched back, so I quit it.
And then some people think Poke is a dirty word. So it worries me that if I was to poke a woman on Facebook would she think I was being suggestive? So I just don’t do any pokes.
A good friend of ours has been out of work for over 3 months now and I know her family is struggling to keep up with the bills. She is on the internet every day for her job search as well as networking and some entertainment to keep her distracted. Trying to be tactful, I asked her if she has considered getting dsl instead of cable internet, and she admitted that she didn’t know anything about it. She thought that cable was the only way to get online now.
I know a lot of people have painful memories of the old dial up internet, but things have changed a lot since the early 1980′s slow connections. I remember trying various services using the telephone line, and even went to the extreme of installing a second lad line so that people could call the house phone and have a chance of getting through. If you only had one phone line back then, people would just get a busy signal all night and not even be able to get through to the answering machine to leave a message.
Of course, all of that has changed now. You do not need a second line and almost no one uses answering machines anymore, either. Unless you are downloading movies and playing high level games on the internet, you can save a lot of money on basic internet service by ditching the cable and going back to dial up.
It was quite the historic moment 30 years ago today, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. That was the time and location of a world changing moment – the introduction of the IBM 5150 personal computer to the world.
Of course, other PCs were already on the market, such as:
the Apple II
the Commodore PET
the Osborne 1
the Tandy TRS-80
You have to admit, that even with the other PCs, the IBM PC was the first full featured, ready to use personal computer that was affordable for most businesses and many homes.
The IBM’s system ran Microsoft’s Disk Operating System, known as MS-DOS and booted from a 5.25 inch floppy drive. It sold for $1,565 with no software except MS-DOS. In today’s money, that would be a little over $3,700.