[LINK] Affordable Internet in Australia for low-income families ? Never happen...

[jim birch]

Brenda Aynsley wrote:

>
> [snip]
>
> > My father never owned or used a pc despite being a highly technical
> person,
> > for example, he developed the Australian weather radar network working at
> > the BOM.  He would have retired about the time when pcs surged onto the
> > desktop, so his staff may have had them but he never did.  I never worked
> > out exactly why he never took it up but I guess he was happy enough and
> busy
> > with other activities.  If things had taken a different twist he could
> > easily have been writing Wikipedia articles.
>
> It's always been my contention that what kept older men away from
> computers was that typing at a keyboard was 'women's work', the typing
> pool never had men working in it, only women, and computers were seen as
> just smarter typewriters.
>

Hmmm.  Dad actually had a couple of typewriters. :) One old mechanical -
museum piece but in going condition - and a newer electronic one.  I think
he might have had too much to do to wrassle a computer - would prefer to
play music or build something.  He always had a few projects on and liked
physical stuff.  It's also possible that he had been exposed to computers
early on when they were a dark art and thought he'd stick with other stuff.

Which reminds me: My mother was a computer!  I the 1950's she worked at WRE
near Adelaide in a room full of women who punched the data from Woomera
rocket shots into mechanical adding machines to work out trajectories.  Job
title: Computer.  (Dad worked on the telemetry systems.)

- Jim