Do you remember what life was like before we had computers and that internet thing? I do. And I bet you there's many of you listening to this who do as well. But I also bet there's a bunch of you who have no idea.
Today, I'm going to talk about why I am so grateful for technology. Hang on. This is going to be a wild one. Well, hello and welcome to the Daily Grateful.
My name is Michael Gross. And I am so grateful for technology. And I am so grateful that even as a boomer, yes, I am a boomer. I just went into technology full throttle when it became available.
My very first computer was a Commodore 64. Remember those? And then I worked my way into the IBM compatible world. IBM was like the big, big dog in town and they were very expensive computers.
So they weren't real smart as far as their source code was concerned. And it soon became very easy for people to just immediately start copying all of their technology and thus was born IBM PC compatible computers, which were a lot more affordable. And I got me one. Yeah, I got me one.
The first one I had had two floppy disk drives in it, no hard drive. And it had a green monitor and it used MS-DOS 2.0. And you had to type everything on the computer. Everything you had to be typed in.
There was no mouse. There was no shortcut. You just had to type in. You had to load and get everything going long about 1987 or so.
There was a group that was a couple of years old by then in our local town. They were called the Pinellas IBM users group. And my good buddy, Ed Clark, who is also a computer nerd, who like me called me up and he said, I'm going to the Pinellas IBM users group meeting tomorrow night. You want to come?
And I said, I don't know. He goes, oh, there's this company called Berkeley Softworks. And they've got something called a GUI that they're going to introduce. I said, it was a GUI.
He said, it's a graphical user interface. I said, I want to go. So off we went. And we went to the plumbers and pipe fitter's union hall in Pinellas Park.
I had no idea there was a plumber's in pipe fitter's union hall. But we went and it was a very big place. Now, the meeting started at seven o'clock and Ed said, we got to get there at like 630 or we're not going to get a seat. I figured it held like 50 people.
So we better get there early. So we got there early. We got there at 630. I could not believe what I walked into.
I walked into a giant room with about 350 people in it. There were still empty seats and there were some up close to the front because people were shy. And we went, sat up front. And this gentleman by the name of Brian Doherty, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, he was the speaker and his company had come out with something called GeoWorks.
And it was a graphical user interface, which by the way, is what we all use now. We don't use GeoWorks, but we all use graphical user interfaces. If you have a Mac, you use Mac iOS. If you have a PC, you're using Windows.
If you have a Chromebook, you're using Chrome, Chrome works, whatever it is. And that's what, and if you have a tablet, you're using, you know, they're graphical user interfaces for everything. And that's exciting. That's very exciting as a matter of fact.
And this guy was there and he says, Yep, we've got this. It's going to revolutionize computers. It's because there was nothing like this on the market. Okay, there was a Windows 1.0, but it was nothing.
I mean, it was just irritating. My friend had it and I didn't understand it. I was just used to doing everything in DOS. So I saw this and he demonstrated and he had 20 copies of it that he was giving away.
And he had a drawing. So we all put our little tickets in and he gave away 20 copies. I was one of the lucky ones. I got a copy.
It came in eight, five and a quarter inch floppy disk drives. There's a bunch of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. I took it home and I said, I'm going to need a hard drive in order to make this work. So I said, okay, we got to get us a hard drive.
Well, lucky me, the Pinellas IBM users group had grindsales a couple of times a year at the local Catholic school. They would take over the cafeteria and people would go in there and they would sell tech. So my buddy, Ed Clark and I, we went to this thing and there was a guy there. He was selling hard drives and I could get a 20 megabyte hard drive.
It was used, but I could buy it from him for the amazingly low price of $35, which was a lot of money back then, but I needed a hard drive in order to run this. And Ed knew how to hook up the hard drive. So bought the hard drive and bought a hard drive. Off we went back to my house.
He installed a hard drive in the next thing you know, I'm installing GeoWorks and my goodness gracious did it change my life. No more typing and I had to get a mouse. So I bought a mouse and I would take them out. I had that plug in and I would go to the mouse and I would hit a tab and I would open up GeoRite, which was their word processing program and they had GeoDaddy.
They had all these little programs that were in there. They had a spreadsheet in there. I said, this is better than anything. This is better than anything.
And I was so grateful for it. But you know what happened? Do you want to know what happened? No.
Why not? I will tell you what happened. A company called Microsoft who had a product called Windows made Windows. Well, first of all, Apple came out with the Macintosh and the Macintosh had a graphical user interface.
But who could afford a Macintosh? Not me. I could afford one. Only the rich people could afford a Macintosh.
This was something that was actually better than the graphical user interface on a Macintosh and I could use it on my PC. But then Microsoft came out with Windows one point or by sorry, Windows 2.0, which was a graphical user interface. I heard Steve Jobs one time, the founder of Apple, one of the founders of Apple say that Microsoft, in his opinion, was like Frito-Lay because Frito-Lay, you can't go into a store anywhere in America without seeing a shelf in there full of all the Frito-Lay products, ruffles, ruffles with ridges, Fritos, Lays, Potato Chip, everything. They're all there and there's all these trucks that come around every week and sales and services sing to death.
They come in and fill those things right back up and they dominate. Frito-Lay dominates. Well, Microsoft did the same thing with computers. They sales in service, Windows 2.0 to death.
And the next thing you knew, everybody had it. And GeoWorks just kind of went away. Although, I got to tell you, I like the Solitaire game on GeoWorks so much better than I liked the Windows version. I just really did.
But it went away. Like technology, it always evolves. It just always evolves. Oh, that club, I was telling you about the Pinellas IBM users group.
They're not known as that anymore. They are now 40 years old in October. They will be 40 years old and they are the Tampa Bay Technology Center. Talking about IBM compatible PCs or any kind of PC, actually, and cell phones and tablets and all kinds of stuff as technology has developed.
And I feel so grateful that even as a boomer, I took advantage of this very early. All of my children grew up with this technology. They were like born into it. They have no idea what it's like to not have computers.
And then I remember when we had computers communicating with other computers locally at first on something called bulletin board systems. And then came the internet, where we all live now. It's amazing. Oh well.
That's my little love for technology and gratitude for technology. We'll see you tomorrow.