Hidden Talents and Special Abilities

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This was before computer mice were really everywhere. My old computers, up until the Windows machine, simply didnt have them.

Deskmate looked like this:




No mouse involved. It was all arrow keys, enter, and the function keys.

Later versions of it involved the mouse (this is one of them), but this (same just with no mouse) was the one I had for a very long time.

ok, your knowledge of such is much bigger than mine- the calculator functions were controlled by the F-function keys? I like that things were not as complicated then even though there wasn't much mice activity.

The calculator was mostly just controlled directly if I recall correctly, you just highlighted it and you could either hit buttons with the arrow keys and such or the proper keys on the keyboard.

The function keys mostly opened the menus that are at the top of that screen there.

Though, other screens had different stuff in them. Depended on what part of it you were in.

The "PClink" bit is the only one I never used. Kinda didnt have a modem, way back then... to think that there ever was such a time, haha. Didnt get internet till a bit after Windows came out. Good ol' America Online and a 56k squealing modem... ah, those were the days... sort of...

I mean, this was all with what would now be REALLY old computers. Back when there were still tons of games that used only the ancient CGA color schemes (4 colors at once). I still remember them by heart, there were 3 possible schemes: black, magenta, light blue, and white, number 2 was black, red, green, orange, and number 3 was blue, red, yellow, green. Permanently burned into my memory, those. I saw them sooooooo often. And I've played some of them recently too.

Deskmate typically used a 16-color scheme though. 256-color VGA stuff hadnt really happened yet, if I recall correctly... I'm a little hazy on the timing of that starting up. But I know the PC I had that version of Deskmate on wouldnt have been able to do such a thing. Neither would the monitor, probably. I think I still have those around somewhere, come to think of it, probably in the computer graveyard under my bed (well, under one of them anyway) or the other one in the closet.

I'll stop before this becomes a rant about all this though... going off on a tangent here...

wish I got hip to puters earlier. MUCH earlier.

Well if it's any consolation, I can't stand having to use my fingers to operate my phone. I much prefer the Palm days of being able to use a stylus to operate it. In fact if I didn't need my iphone for a few things my Palm couldn't do, I'd probably go back to it til my provider stopped supporting it.

i'll be one of the last people on earth to use a tablet or smart phone, prolly by the time everybody else and their brother has an apple watch with AI and eyeglass vision or something. then I will look like an old fuddy duddy in comparison

You'd be amazed how "old school" my lineup of gadgets are. I have one of the tablets Blackberry made that didn't do so well but I love using it, a Ti-83 I got from a friend when I entered high school, a standalone digital camera, a standalone iPod when I already have an iPhone (truthfully the iPod does the job better), and a desktop I use for all my computing and a laptop I rarely use because well, I usually don't go anywhere but school or the store.

I used a tower until I got my first laptop in 2010, since then all laptop. mostly it was because I live in a little tin can and my old windows 98PC started getting senile and I didn't have room for another, I couldn't just ashcan the 98 machine because it still does certain things well. I used it to restore hundreds of recordings but had to get a new puter [laptop for space reasons] just because the 98 pc couldn't do the internet anymore, not enough power or ability to upgrade to 256 bit web thingies.

Ahh yeah, that's another reason I just conceded and went to the iPhone. The Palm worked fine for texting and phone calls, but the web software was too outdated to work with much of anything.

if apple wasn't so daggone expensive I'd have gone with them. but they priced me out early on so I just stuck with windows stuff.

I'm an Apple user for a very long time but it's less and less worth it recently, OS X is more and more buggy and slow (google "El Crapitan", you'll see why). Now Macs like to crash just as much as regular PCs (if not more). Many Linux distributions are very close to OS X when it comes to using them, but they're much faster, reliable, better in general. And cheaper of course.

I remember using iMacs in high school (so in 2010-2011) and they would crash as soon as you tried to access a flash drive more often than not.

so apple is getting worse but windows is getting better?

Definitely seems that way to me, or I just have some aspect Apple products don't like about me.

I never had any problem with OS X, I loved it until I installed the Yosemite upgrade. Since then OS X drove me crazy. It runs out of memory (even with 8 GB, and light software) in about one hour and crashes if I don't clean memory all the time. It's a memory-eating monster. I've haven't seen any Mac user who doesn't complain about OS X now.

I suspected that if I waited long enough I'd have my revenge against apple