The 8008 693

The washing was done outside, it tended to get messy, and the mangle was far to big to get into the tiny kitchen! The hot water came from a tap and heated in a galvanised boiler on the stove...but we collect rain water now!

All this character building experience was when I was 7 or 8 years old courtesy of an eccentric old great-aunt who wouldn't have the new-fangled electrickery in the house, and still did things the same way things were done when she was a girl in the 19th C. She still had gas light downstairs and oil lamps and candles in the bedrooms! This was in the 1950s.

I was reminded of how quickly these things get forgotten when I was watching an American tv series recreating the old pioneer wagon trains. There was one poor unfortunate woman trying to wash the clothes with a washboard and it was obvious no-one had taught her how to use one - something every girl back then learned from her mother as soon as she could walk. Having the physical artefacts tells you little about how they were used. We should bear this in mind in this newsgroup - how will people know *how* card and tape punches and all the trappings of early computers were actually used when the members of this group (and others, of course) are long gone.

(Sorry, didn't mean to ramble on so much, it's a quiet Saturday evening!)

-- Cheers, Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com (Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.)

The future was never like this!