One of the scariest movies ever is Father Of The Bride. It's bad enough the poor dad, George Banks (played by Steve Martin) having his retirement funds sucked out of him by the sinister wedding-planning villain, Franck (Martin Shott). But the worst part is when the daughter Annie (Kimberley Williams-Paisley) announces to George that she is getting married. We see the twenty-something beauty announce the marriage, but George double-takes because all he can see is the five year old version of Annie, his precious baby girl, speaking the same words. As the father of daughters myself, I have to blink back a tear every time I'm forced to watch the damn thing. A similar, although less emotional marking of the quiet, inexorable passage of time happened to me today in Best Buy.
I'd gone in to buy some extra RAM for my PC and I spotted this sitting quietly on the shelves. They've probably been out and about for some time now, but this is the first time I've personally seen a TeraByte disc lying about for all to see. A TeraByte! C'mon people, let's show a bit of respect and admiration.
I mean, a TeraByte - it's bloomin' luxury. When ah wur a lad, we didn't have TeraBytes. We didn't even have GigaBytes. In fact, ye were lucky if ye 'ad MegaBytes.
<Cue trip down Nostalgia Way>
I remember the depths of despair plumbed and giddy heights of achievement ascended by me and my pal John as we tried to load a "Defender" game onto his ZX-81. It didn't have any kind of bytes on a disk. We had to hook up the machine to a cassette tape recorder, and load the game from there. The only way you knew the game was loading was by the subtle change in the interference pattern on the TV screen, and by the barely perceptible shift in the pitch of the scream from the tape recorder's speaker.
The basic ZX-81 had only 1K of RAM (1K!), so John had bought a huge, massive, 64K RAM pack in order to load Defender. It was connected directly onto the edge connector of the ZX-81's PCB. (It was hardly a motherboard - it was the only bloody board.) The trouble was, the edge connector was so flakey, even pressing down on the table top was enough to cause the entire machine to crash, losing all of the Defender loaded to that point. We tried to solve the problem by buying some ribbon cable and another edge connector, but I think we almost passed out with solder flux fumes before ever getting it to work.
Ah, those were the days my friends. Sniff.
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