OK, children...

From: "Sieghard Weitzel" <sieghard@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2010 21:32:15 -0700
Well, apart from myself there seem to be a few others who go way back.

 

I started with Jaws in the fall of 1989, so pretty much exactly 21 years
ago. That was, of course, with DOS version 3.something, not too much later
DOS 4 came out. Jaws version I think was 1.1 for DOS, the entire program fit
on a single Floppy disc if I remember correctly and at the time I was a
student at the University of Western Ontario and my computer was actually
one of the more advanced ones among my fellow students. I had a desktop
machine, but in those days few of them were towers, most were flat like a
piece of stereo equipment. It was a 386 16 Mhz processor with 1 Megabyte of
RAM (that actually meant 640 Kb) and my hard drive was 70 Mb, yes that is
Megabytes as in 1000 Megabytes making up 1 Gigabyte, so 40000 of my hard
drives would have had the capacity of somebody's 40 Gb dirve I read about on
the last post with that 233 Mhz machine, mine had 16 Mhz back then.

 

So, yes, this technology has made unbelievable leaps and I think sometimes
we all need to sit back and consider how fortunate we are as people with
various visual disabilities to have such access to information and such a
wide variety of ways to communicate with friends, family and for business. I
am originally from Germany and I remember that in the mid to late 80s when I
was still living in Germany it cost about $3 for a minute of long distance
calling to Canada. So, a half hour talk would have cost close to $100. When
I renewed my last Skype World Subscription it cost me $130 for an entire
year of calling Germany and 40 other countries if I so wish more or less as
much as I want.

 

So, enjoy the gift of technology and make the most of it.

 

Regards,

Sieghard
OK, children...

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