This is not genealogy, but without it, none of us would have access to the web, belong to research lists, etc. 25 years ago this year, IBM introduced the 5150 home computer - 1981. Big deal? Well, yes! For you youngsters on the list, those of us who have been around a long time in the computer world (1968 for me)... this was the first important step in bringing the world of genealogy etal into our homes. When I started out in the computer biz in 1968, it took an entire room to house the computer system that we now have sitting in a desktop or laptop. Floors with water vats under it to keep the humidity at the correct level; the computer room enclosed in glass walls with little pollution zappers catching every little particle of dust .. the operators only with the authorization to enter the sacred computer room itself - huge tape drives; very heavy disk packs. No software to zip through our genealogy, but punched cards produced by programmers who sat for hours with pen and paper writing in a machine language to make the computer do what you wanted it to. You wrote the instructions, key punchers typed it, verifiers re-punched it to catch errors; the huge card decks taken into the inner sanctum; the print outs produced IF the program ran correctly - if not, huge print outs brought back to the programmer with "core dumps" in hexadecimal or other machine language code. Then the programmers working with those dumps to try to figure out why the program didn't work - correcting - repunching - re-verifying - re-running. Sometimes for a LONG time! When the personal computer was introduced by IBM and other competitors, it was a mass of cables (worse than today!), and as you can see by the specs in the URL I gave you ... very little memory and capabilities. BUT, we thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We wrote our own genealogy programs in a language called Basic - a horrid little thing - but it worked. Every piece of data had to be hard entered into the system - if you had enough memory to use it! And - then all of a sudden, the computer world exploded into what we are familiar with today. From 5 1/2 inch "floppies" to 3 1/2 inch not so floppies, zip drives, external and internal hard drives ... and now so much that the average person can't keep up with it. Thus, sitting on my desk and yours is a personal computer that back in the 1960's on would have taken an entire room of wires, vats, drives, tapes, flashing lights, dust zappers ... it means more to us "oldsters" I guess who have been there with the key punchers and the box after box of punched cards (which sometimes got dropped!). And, as an aside - being one of the very first female programmers for the State of IL - women were NEVER allowed in the computer room. We couldn't touch anything as it was felt we would contaminate something. And a female programmer? Why no, you had to be a male with a college degree in Computer Processing - women didn't have the logic necessary to program a computer. Thankfully, I broke that barrier as did many thousands of other women when offices ran out of males with college educations and they found that women made excellent programmers - we paid attention to detail and had the patience to work our way through core dumps! This is just a little extra that I thought you might enjoy. I know I did handstands, almost literally (I was younger!) when the first software program was introduced to "do genealogy". PAF and Family Tree were two of the earliest but had their own limitations for awhile. What a joy to throw out the Basic coding and get down to business of tracking the family tree! And then ... the internet ... rootsweb, etc. We've come a long way baby! Sandi http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_fact.html Sandi's Puzzlers: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~gensoup/gorin/puz.html SCKY Links: http://www.public.asu.edu/~moore/Gorin.html GGP: http://ggpublishing.tripod.com/