And hello, welcome to Wednesday. This is the Daily Grateful. Getting out late today because my Zoom Podtrack P8 would not start. It was just really weird.
I had to do a lot of messing with it to make it work. Anyway, that's technology for you today. And that's what I want to talk about today is technology. My very first computer, my very first computer, was a Commodore 64.
And I got it when I was a school teacher. In 1985, I was teaching horticulture. And I got this Commodore 64 and a what was then called a 12-pin not matrix printer. Now, what was this thing going to do for me?
What was this thing going to do for me? I was a teacher. And I used to create on a typewriter worksheets for my horticulture students. Now, my students were people who were going to be out working in horticulture on a daily basis when they got through with the program that I was teaching.
They were going to be working for landscapers. They were going to be working in nurseries. Some of them were going to be working in lawn care. So it was all very practical stuff that we were teaching.
And there were no textbooks that were based on that. So we would have to go and create stuff. And I would sit down on a typewriter and I would type out these worksheets. And then I would go and I would fill out a form and I would take it up to the office where somebody would eventually make copies of it for me to give to everybody.
And it was a big thing. I mean, it was a really... If I created a worksheet today and I submitted it to the office, it was three pages long, they hated three pages long. And my worksheets would have just like questions on them that I wanted the students to look up in all of the available material that we had, the text and things like that.
And so the worksheet might say, please name three pests that affect pendopom trees. And then I would have an area there for them to write out the three names. And so it wasn't really complicated. They were just basically questions where I would say St.
Augustine grass is very susceptible to what type of fungus. And I would put it out there and I would give them two choices of the funguses that it was there. And then I would give it to them and they would grade it. But I would create a worksheet today on my typewriter.
And if you make a mistake on the typewriter, you know, I'm... So I got this Commodore 64 computer. And wow, I was so grateful because I didn't have it at school. I had it at home because it was my personal Commodore 64 computer.
And I would sit there and I would create worksheets for the next day, for the very next day I would sit there at night. And I would do like a three, sometimes a four-page worksheet. And the paper that you had to go into this dot matrix printer was... had the little holes on the side that you could rip off.
Remember those? Remember that? And it came in a box of a thousand. I would buy a box of a thousand sheets.
So I would set that thing up. And I remember I had 18 students. So I would create a three-page worksheet and I would print out 18 copies of it. And you'd hear the thing on...
...there, there, there, there, across there. The technology is as simple as that is in today's world. And the way there was a word processing disk that I would have to put into this thing. There was no hard drives or anything like that.
You had to... you first had to put in a systems disk to get the computer loaded. Then you had to put in another disk for the program you were using, like a word processor. I have to...
where'd I get those? Anyway, you would put in a... you would put in the word processing program. And then you could pull that disk out and stick a blank disk in if you wanted to save what you would written.
Yeah, it was complicated. I know, I know. And I would make these worksheets. And then I would push the print and you'd hear this thing just printing up all over the place like crazy.
And I had two young children who just loved hearing that printer go off. They were, you know, they were five and three. And they, you know, they got all excited about that. I remember that.
So that was technology that I was incredibly grateful for. And then as we progressed, and then I go to school the next day and I would rip off these worksheets. You know, come to everybody, have their worksheets. And they would fill it out in the morning.
We would do this. It's in the morning, I would have them do their worksheets. And then just open up a brand new way for me to teach. And then I would lecture about what was on the worksheet and everybody would fill in their worksheets at the same time.
And then turn them in and then we were all out in the nursery or we were all, you know, some of us were out in the nursery, some of us were out in the greenhouse. You know, some of us were maintaining our golf green. We had a golf green that we maintained. And, you know, we were doing all kinds of things like that.
But this was a godsend for me because I could just come up with something, say the weather change, and we were working on a different plant type based on the weather. I could create a worksheet about that. We had a hurricane, a pretty interesting hurricane that came through. And I could create a worksheet about how to deal with plants after a hurricane.
And we, you know, that would be part of our lesson plan. It was a really cool thing and I enjoyed it. And, you know, forget the flying cars. Be grateful now with the technology that we have now that you can sit on your computer and you can send messages to your Aunt Martha who lives in Kansas and you live in Battle Creek.
Okay? The other neat thing about technology is something I've got right here in my hand. It's my iPhone. It's a magical little library.
It holds the entire world's knowledge, right in this little tiny thing that I have here. I am so grateful for that. And then there's other things that technology has just been such a godsend for. Social media is one of them.
Yeah, it could be messy. But, you know, there's, I have kept in touch. I'm an old guy now. I've kept in touch with a bunch of people I went to high school with.
And all through social media, that has been really cool. And people have found me from, you know, when I was a kid. It is just terrific. So I am very, very grateful for all of the technology today that we have.
And all of the technology that we're going to have in the future. It's going to be really cool. I'm going to love it. You know, if I'm still around, then I will be.
So it's going to be cool. Hope you're having a terrific Wednesday. I'm glad I got my Zoom Pod Track B8 fixed. And I did it all by myself.
And we're back up on the air again. This is good. But there's newer technology than this Zoom Pod Track B8. And while this thing wasn't working, I was looking at that up.
Alright, we'll see you tomorrow.