Lisa Ramsay: Fill & Download for Free

My daughter Lisa (now Dr Lisa Ramsay http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/ramsay/), when 3 or 4, asked - "Is it true that God made everything like they say at Sunday School?" I said "Yes", taking the safe route, having come off worst more than once in debates with her before. "Who made God then?"

In 1971, our Financial Director returned from a USA trip with a Bowmar Pocket Calculator.It was a simple, four function calculator with a red 8 digit LED display. None of us lowly programmers had seen anything like this in our lives, neither could we conceive of paying more than a months salary for this hugely desirable device, but we could see the great advantage of something that actually fitted in your pocket and displayed the answer - and that you owned personally - over what was in general use - a company owned, shared, large and heavy plug in adding machine that printed the calculations and results on a paper roll. That was my first experience of techno-envy, and a very bad one at that. That was the device that made me think "wow, this changes EVERYTHING"Eight years later, in 1979, I had my second "Wow" moment, the one that changed my life. I was working for ICL selling Mainframe and so called "Mini" computers - which needed a whole air-conditioned room to house them. Then in May 1979 I saw this - the ICL (Singer) 1501 Intelligent terminal system (originally the Cogar 4 by George Cogar, the rights were acquired by Singer, who were then purchased by ICL, in what was probably their last inspired gasp, before the decline started. They just could not break away from mainframes completely until too late)Here was a computer of sorts - that could sit on a desk, It had its own little screen and keyboard and you could add external peripherals like a printer. I played a few games on it, ran a few of the sample programs that came on dinky little round cassettes (you can see the two casette drives on the top under the flip up lid). This was a revelation to me. This was the future. Mainframes were going to die in our mainly small business market. So I upped and left, negotiated an Apple II dealership, later an IBM PC dealership.One day in 1984, we were called into an Apple demo. We had been underwhelmed by the Apple 3 launch a year or so previously, and were not expecting much. We were introduced to the Apple Lisa.Another Wow moment. The graphical Interface and the mouse were going to be huge! Although it was replaced soon thereafter by the Apple MacIntosh, and we only ever sold one Apple Lisa, it bears a special place in my heart - my daughter who had been born in 1981 was named Lisa, and so was Steve Job's daughter, Cool.Suddenly this happened:I experienced Compuserve. This was before the web, and before I had even seen the Internet, which was at that stage (early 90's) mainly in Universities.Compuserve was a dialup subscription paid service. Text based, as you can see, but at last, I could download Novell and Hewlett Packard and Seagate patches and drivers online! No more driving to suppliers premises and begging for a copy of their out of date floppy disks. No more waiting for weeks for them to be shipped from the USA. And that "Wow" moment led me to start an ISP, and here I am still today, getting excited about every new thing that comes along.63 years old, and still like a kid in a candy store.

This occurred to me at some point too, but there was some downtime between when Jon was punching Ramsey on the ground and when Sansa came to visit him in the kennel. It's entirely possible that Jon or someone else mentioned it to her in that time. Not necessarily even in a this would be a great way to torture him way, but a we should probably go feed those dogs way.