I was reading this post the other day and it made me think of the various computers I’ve owned. A homebrew COSMAC Elf (1802), a TRS-80 model 3, a Data General Nova 1200 Jumbo (yes, I had it my garage for years), and a slew of PCs and other lesser computers.

Makes me a little sad, however. My kids will simply recall which PCs they owned. I don’t think any of my kids have any recollection of anything less than a Pentium! While PCs today are very exciting, I can’t help but wonder if most of the upcoming generation will never know the thrill of interfacing a Friden Flexowriter to a computer (yes, I had one of those too).

I once spent some time wandering in a mall and saw a booth offering “computerized handwriting analysis.” The box was full of blinking lights and there was a slot with some buttons underneath but no keyboard or screen (this was back in the late 70s, so the general public wouldn’t find that odd). Upon receipt of a dollar, the man would take a slip of paper that you’d written on, fit it to the slot, push a button and you’d hear mechanical clacking as the machine sucked up the paper. When the paper emerged again, it had some “fortune cookie” saying on it.

I kept studying the machine from a distance, certain it looked familiar. Suddenly it hit me. The machine was a hood covering a Flexowriter! Beneath the hood was an endless loop of paper tape with a few “cookies” surrounded by line feeds and ending with a stop code. So when you put the paper in and pressed “read tape” the platen would turn, a message would print and the paper would eject out the other side until the stop code was read at which point the tape was positioned for the next victim–um, customer.

Those days, I suppose, are long gone.