Egor Presents

     

Me with Egor

We had a personal computer before most folks did. His name was Egor – with an E and pronounced with the long E sound. It was a Tandy TRS-80 from Radio Shack. Ex-hubby had it before I came along in 1980 – a monitor, keyboard, and funny little printer. After I was in the picture, we got a word processing program and a slightly better printer so I could get comfortable with and use Egor too. We had tried getting me to learn how to write software (all the programs that come with computers today or are easily acquired were non-existent and not really anticipated back then) – the only thing I could think of that would apply to my life was a checkbook balancing program, and after working on it a while, we realized I'd be happier just writing everything down and doing the math myself, like always. So much for my binary DOS education.

One of the Cookbooks

       When we bought the Radio Shack word processing program, it was a much more successful, better fit for me. The first thing I did was to put all the recipes I had into the program and print them out onto index cards that I then hole-punched and we created Egor cookbooks for gifts for Christmas. Eric still uses many of the recipes such as the spaghetti sauce and of course Mother Des Soye's Delicious Variation of Grandma Brown's Baked Beans. I go through the Egor cookbook myself these days for the cream cheese frosting recipe, the pistachio nut swirl cake, and all the Christmas cookies that Mom used to make every year, and the tips for baking that I put together after my failures and successes at making the same cookies such as don't let the butter get too soft, or decrease baking time as batches of cookies continue.

       After that we got a modem and then an even better printer. Floppy disks replaced cassette tapes. Ex-hubby wrote his thesis. I started writing more – even a journal of sorts for our first-born.

       When Sarah arrived in July of 1984, Sarah's dad declared that she needed to have her own computer. I thought he was kidding until he came home with a computer system for our infant daughter.

       We named the computer Bertha. I think it was an Atari – it had a keyboard and the monitor was an actual television. So we had a second tv – but we never used it as a tv until many years later after we were living in Texas and the girls were able to use Egor for computering and knew how to hook up Bertha if they wanted to play Atari games.

Bertha, Sarah, Amanda

       There is a picture somewhere of the toddler Sarah sitting on her father's lap in front of Bertha and seemingly paying rapt attention to what was on the screen.

       Last week Sarah said she had put both of her kids in their room in the afternoon to take a nap, but three-year-old Horatio was making a lot of noise and keeping his sister from sleeping, so Sarah put him in her bedroom, told him to take a nap or just be quiet, and she shut the door. A few minutes later she checked in on Horatio who was being a little too quiet – he had found Sarah's ipad, knew how to use it, and was watching a movie!

       Today a TRS-80 is on display in the Smithsonian Museum – an example of the dinosaur days of computers. Our own Egor is in the cubby downstairs, Googling today says Egor is worth between $25 and $250 -I'll hold on to him a while longer. I do not know what kind of system I am typing on today or what software program – just glad it works without me having to cuss at it too much or without losing an entire document because I tried to hyphenate.

       If I have any problems or questions, Mike, my daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren can help me log-on, retrieve what I have lost, or even watch a movie when I should be napping!

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