I bought my very first computer in the fall of 1979, just months before the IBM-PC was released for sale to the public.  It was a KayPro-II, a portable, sometimes called a suitcase computer, as it was portable in the sense that you could lug it around if you had eaten your Wheaties.  However, it had no battery so it was useless without an electrical socket.  And truthfully, to me it was useless anyway, at least for about two months, because the user manual was, well, let’s just say rudimentary.

Every night I would grab a take-out, go home to my humble lodging, boot up the KayPro, and try to make sense of the words in the manual.  It was tough going, believe me, but eventually I began to pick it up.  It helped somewhat when it finally dawned on me that computers were idiots, utter idiots, stupidly literal idiots, but their saving grace was that they were blazingly fast idiots.

After the KayPro I bought a Compaq, which was my first IBM-PC compatible computer.  In the years since, I have had dozens more desktop machines, but I built them all myself, preferring to buy the best components, but only those components that I really wanted in the machine.

What brought all this to mind was my discovery of a short two-minute video clip from the Today Show in 1994, during which Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, and some other woman sit around discussing the meaning and utility of the “@” symbol in an internet e-mail address string, before finally just asking one of their off-camera staff, “What is the internet, anyway?”

Check out the video, HERE, and ponder how far we have come.