Monday, November 11, 2024

Good News From Redmond

     My decade-old copy of Word 2010 does install in a Windows 11 machine.  It comes with the same caveats it had grown on the old computer -- you don't get the full panoply of features the latest version provides -- but it did install and run, and it looks like the things I need it for still work.

     All this thanks to Tam's saved-back DVD/CD-ROM drive.  I have one somewhere, but it's stashed in the back of one of several different desk drawers, and when she noticed me digging and asked what for, her drive was ready to hand.

     I hang well to the back of the technology curve.  This desktop computer, like its predecessor, cost a little over a hundred dollars.  Because I don't play computer games,* I don't need extreme speed or the latest graphics; most kinds of software don't need that much horsepower.
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* There's a story there.  I spent a lot of my time in college on a PLATO terminal (and the school's shared-time mainframes, a DEC-10 and a PDP-9), playing games and taking online learning modules that had little to do with my major.  I spent a lot more time at the campus radio station.  Between the two, classwork suffered.  The electronics classes weren't a problem; everything except circuit analysis was essentially review.  And first semester Applied Math For Technology was a delight.  It was when the university decided to save costs and fold that class into Calculus in the second semester that things got dicey -- especially since our working-engineer math professor was replaced by a pure-math guy who had been sent to our extension campus after getting crosswise with his department head.  It would have been a good time to buckle down and really apply myself.  19 year old Bobbi spent even more time on the PLATO terminal instead.  Pity it didn't offer a calculus course....  I did learn how to program in BASIC, which used to be handy.

1 comment:

Cop Car said...

I don't know about your experience with math professors, but my own showed a definite difference in communications with male versus female profs. I had to transfer from a school at which all profs were male to a school where that was not the case. My male vector analysis prof at the latter school died, mid-semester, and was replaced by a female. In my case, suddenly, the course became simple. Obviously, this is painting with a broad brush, but it was an eye-opener to me!