ICT Procrastinationitis pt 2

Once upon a time (and a very good time it was) there was a girl who loved watching Star Trek. She was embarassingly in love with Captain Kirk, quite fancied Mr Spock and spent most of the time she should have been doing her homework reading her way through her father\’s massive stash of science fiction, including early Analogs and Astounding Science Fiction magazines going back to the Fifties.
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This meant she was very excited when the school announced it was going to spend the requisite vast amount of money and get a computer, one of the first computers in schools ever.
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When the thing arrived she snuck into the classroom where it was kept and sat down in front of it. \”Computer!\” she said to it, commandingly.
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It said nothing. Later the maths teacher explained that if you wanted to get it to do anything you had to write a programme for it. In fact programming it to do long division was extremely difficult and slow and involved flow-diagrams and binary coding and something monstrous called hexadecimal.
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The girl was bitterly disappointed. She carried on turning her large maths textbook sideways and opening it so that she could pretend the lefthand page in front of her was a screen and the righthand page was really a keyboard. She called her new invention the compubook and was quite annoyed when somebody else invented it again many years later and called it a laptop.
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Yes, folks. I invented the laptop-concept.
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I did try to learn how to program the computer, but found it too frustrating and incomprehensible. You clearly needed to be able to Do Maths, which I couldn\’t because of the evil School Maths Project (whose textbook had formed the prototype laptop). So I went back to drooling over film actors (I\’d moved on a bit from Star Trek) and pretending I was piloting spaceships past dangerous black holes and dealing with computers that, when addressed, responded briskly \”Working!\”
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I\’m still waiting for that.