(If you are looking for serious learning, skip this column.)
I checked Ancestry.com and was able to trace my lineage back to about 1936. We sure didnât look anything like we do now. The earliest I could find some of my ancestors that were anything like me, at least in the internal organs, was 1941.
The U.S. Army did a lot of work in the 1940s trying to get my family to go from an expensive welfare burden to contributors to society. My great-great-grandma and grandpa were so messed up when they were born that the docs found thousands of vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, relays, and switches in them. Talk about evolution; things have certainly gotten better.
One of the birth defects we used to have was that we just could not remember anything. In the mid ’40s, someone invented RAM, and then in the mid ’50s someone else came up with core memory. Thank heavens, because if they didnât, I would not be able to be here telling you my life story.
In one sense, Iâm probably down about four generations. The first generation was full of vacuum tubes; the second showed up with a belly full of transistors; the third was born with a serious integrated circuit, and my generation is just one big microprocessor.
My great-grandpa, we called him papa Unie (his real name was Univac), was born March 31, 1951. He was one of the smarter ones in our family. He predicted the results of the Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential race in 1952. Talk about a child protĂ©gĂ©. I think itâs kind of ghoulish, though, that they keep papa Unieâs body in the Smithsonian Institution.
I know there is a lot of controversy over English being the national language, but my family has had its own language for over 50 years. We call it FORTRAN. There are some other winds of change blowing, like people who want to get rid of cursive writing. Again, my family is sort of an independent lot; weâve had our own writing, also for over 50 years, called MICR.
Back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, my family realized that we were far too big and fat to be much of a benefit to society. So we figured out a way to lose weight and take up a lot less room. It also helped us to move around a lot faster. We starting taking a little pill called the integrated circuit chip. Wow, did it work wonders. We not only slimmed down, we were able to accomplish things much faster, and we reduced the cost of doing tasks by a factor of 1,000,000 to 1. Can you believe that?
I was kind of embarrassed to talk about it, but because when we were big and fat, we used to live in huge âclean rooms.â Then as time went on, we started to have mice. At first we just felt bad, but after a while we tamed them and used then to clean our Windowsâjust need a little ingenuity.
My grandfather was in the military and helped invent the ARPAnet. Then when he retired from the service, he saw how sociable our family was, and he sort of tweaked ARPAnet a little and gave us the Internet so we could all keep in touch. Thereâs some politician who claims that he invented the Internet, but we all know that it was really gramps.
My family considers education to be very important. One of our teachers came up with a new way of getting more knowledge into us faster. It was quite an operation. He put a horizontal slot in our belly and shoved in a disc. Ouch, at first it was 5 1/2-inches across, but it hurt so much that he started using a 3 1/2-inch one. Oh, the price of progress.
I donât really know exactly when I was born. They say my birth was really something. I came out in pieces, and the doc had to assemble me. Talk about an auspicious beginning. By the way, they named me PEA SEA. Iâm one of those kids that people love one moment and hate the next.
