Thursday, November 27, 2014

Rewinding to ones computing past

I'm not feeling that great today to be honest with what feels like a winter cold coming on that I hope clears in just over a weeks time but be that as it may, I was looking a bit at the statistics Google give you about what posts people read, where they're from, any sites they used to find this blog and so on and one thing that struck me was actually some of you do read the older posts. It was that which got me thinking.
I think must of us are aware of how our experience of the Internet has changed over the years, how that's fed into what we use to access it and the different programs we've had connected with our use of computers.
I suspect many of us have what you call a desktop that after some seconds, comes up often with a colourful design.
Well as some of you have been reading posts from 2008, here's one of mine from December that year that tells you quite a few things.
To start with like now in 2008 I also was in love with Miss Kitty so I made it the main image rather than that bland Windows XP Pro  screen.
Also look at the dimensions specifically the aspect ratio, it's 4:3 that tells you I had more traditional CRT monitor the time compared to the near universal 16:9 or 16:10 Widescreen Lcd ones we have today.
Also, it's resolution is 600x800 which is very low by modern standards.
Looking at the toolbar you'll spot firstly Microsoft were highlighting an urgent security issue with that shield with ! mark and Skype was set up on the machine although I didn't use it much.
Like today you'll spot the Avast antivirus program (the blue ball with an A) that I've always used, a program for a separate webcam I no longer use, the Nero 6 Smartstart cd writing program and Yahoo messenger that I suspect a good number of us had back then as we used Yahoo's services like Geocities, messenger and email. I seldom log into Yahoo today with services from Google being that much better overall.
Also you'll spot a trio of Mozilla Foundation programs such as the browser Firefox which was much better at the time when it came to security and features than Internet Exploder 6  (I.E to some), the email program Thunderbird which I used with a lousy Internet Service Providers (I.S.P.) email services until I moved to web based mail exclusively, that organized my mail and allowed me to have coloured backgrounds and text that help my dyslexia and Sunbird, a desktop based calendar to help me with organizing my life which is effectively replaced now  by the Google cloud based Calendar.
I now use Pale Moon a Swedish forked version of Firefox as my main browser on my laptops and the old desktop is gone!
The keenly eyed will also have spotted the installation files for the free cd copying program, dbPoweramp and the shortcut for music player Winamp both of which are installed and much used on my newer laptops. There was no iTunes installed as the machine was incapable of running it although it was very popular back then.
I wonder how many of view still have pictures of your old desktops and can tell the story behind them?

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