Came across this

A word from our sponsor:

1200-320-max.jpg
Printer-friendly version

Author: 

Blog About: 

old photo while I was looking for a book. I'd forgotten it was there, and taken probably about 1988, so I'd have been 35 ish and without grey hair or wrinkles and rather too many pounds lighter as well.

2022-04-10 14.39.56.jpg

Comments

Wow!

joannebarbarella's picture

Just that!

For your amusement...

SammyC's picture

A picture of me and the real-life Elizabeth (from my story Painted From Memory) circa 1982-3 in front of Low Library, Columbia University.

columbia1982.JPG

The years have gone by too quickly in some ways, too agonizingly slowly in other ways. Isn't it the same for everyone?

Hugs,

Sammy

The bookshelf

Maddy Bell's picture

Has got a bit fuller, the computer a bit newer but it’s unmistakably you!


image7.1.jpg    

Madeline Anafrid Bell

Looking good Angharad

leeanna19's picture

Looking good Angharad

Looks like you were into writing back then. That looks like an Amstrad PCW 8256 r Word Processor. I had one. Crazy low price for what you got.

cs7.jpg
Leeanna

Love that smile

Podracer's picture

That's a good photo, Ang.

Teri Ann
"Reach for the sun."

Great photo of you but ...

... annoyingly not sharp enough to read the titles of the books on the shelf behind you. A very tidy shelf, too, at least compared to the one in front me as I write :) Never mind about the grey - you're still 13 years behind me and my hair's trending to white - though still there.

The first IBM clone PC I had access to at home belonged to a cycling organisation where I edited their magazine, was an Amstrad. It didn't even have a hard drive until I fitted one! Yours looks about the same vintage.

R

The books

Angharad's picture

are all distributed around the house, some are Collins New Naturalist series (top shelf) plus a set of shorter books also by Collins I think on different elements like woodlands and I think one was on plants (middle shelf), bottom shelf is a series of more specialist bird books published by Poyser.

Last time I counted them I had about 250-300 books on birds and ornithology out of my total collection of about 4,000. The problem is I don't have space to display or order them properly, so they are shoved in where there is a space, including all up my stairs, on the landing and in all the bedrooms and the two downstairs reception rooms and my laboratory. I'm hoping to do a loft conversion possibly next year when I am less busy with the OU and try to include lots of shelf space for books as I intend to turn the loft into a large study cum library, where I can look at maps and charts. The only room without books, is the kitchen, there are even some in the bathroom.

Angharad

When I was a child ...

... there were always books in the bathroom! My dad would retreat there, after asking someone to mind the shop, and spend a while reading whilst having a sit down :) We lived at the shop in a big rambling building.

My non-fiction is mostly sailing, motorcycles, pedal cycles and, more recently, aeroplanes (mostly as scale references or modelling techniques). The books on electronics and computers date from when I was gainfully employed which makes them 25 years out of date!

Never counted the books other than being aware there are too many. If we couldn't read the house might even be tidy.

R

No mouse

No mouse of course. I got my first only in the nineties.

No mouse

The Armstrad PCW ran CP/M, which had a text-based interface, not a graphics-based interface, and no need for a mouse. Even the PC-DOS IBM PC did not use a mouse. Mice didn't come into use on Intel systems until Microsoft Windows became popular, though they were used on Apple II computers earlier.

Not quite

RobertaME's picture

I was heavily into computers at the time and before Windows was more than a file browser I had a 3-button Logitech mouse that ran out of DOS. It had its own set of TSR drivers and an interface program called Logimenu that could be used to run custom compiled MNU files to create "scroll menus" controlled with the mouse to execute commands or batch files at the DOS prompt... at a time when Windows was just version 1.0 and only run by a handful of users.

What's more, many DOS-based programs like Wordperfect, Lotus 123, X-TREE Gold, and many others were able to use the mouse as a "point and click" device. The cursor was usually either a hashed text block or a colored block.

Mouse Cursor in WordPerfect 6.1

There was even a mouse for the Commodore 64 in 1987 when Windows 2.0 was still in Beta testing. I had a 1351 mouse for my C128 back in the day.

Sorry... someone left my geek-girl dip switches in the ON position and set for IRQ 4, Base Address 3f8. ::giggle::

Roberta

Amstrad PCW

The posh version with two hard disc drives. PCW standing for Personal Computer Word-processor. One of the best word processors of the time and to be the first computer just about every small business had in its office in the UK. Loved mine, but gave it away when I got the windows thing. Wish I still had the old green screen thing.

Amstrad PCW 8256 it had CP/M

leeanna19's picture

Amstrad PCW 8256 it had CP/M operating system . OC's were very expensive. This machine was sold for around £399 in 1986. Bundled with office software , monitor and a printer. Most businesses wer still using typewriters before then.

People moan about Amstrad, but thye did a lot to make computing affordable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

cs7.jpg
Leeanna