so um do you have a PC
yes i have a Macintosh SE thirty
um-hum yeah one of my friends are into Macintoshes i have a um PC my a IBM PC myself
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a two eighty six but i'm probably eventually gonna get a three eighty six
um
what do you use yours for mostly
um mostly um word processing applications and uh just as a dumb terminal uh
uh-huh
but i'm um i think eventually i'll start using it for spread sheets and things like that um what do you find that you use yours mostly for
well i do a lot of word processing and spread sheets and data base and uh about the only thing i am uh i'm just starting to get in into uh a little bit more communications now i've just today ordered a fax modem so i'll be able to
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send and receive faxes right over there without using you know you don't have to make a hard copy that way
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uh are you using windows
no i i think i i'm planning on like moving up getting a three eighty six before i move up to Windows although you know i do like the the graphical user environment yeah
uh-huh
uh-huh well it's getting to be more and more like a Macintosh
yeah it's just
um i want it i want it you know well i just i just want it more for multitasking which i suppose is also like a Macintosh um
um-hum well the one thing i used to use a i've never used an IBM actually i used to use a just an Apple two E which of course is looks pretty primitive now
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yeah i used that's what i learned a lot of languages on was an Apple two E in my high school
but i don't have any uh any real programming capabilities on my uh Mac right now i don't have uh any compilers
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so i'm uh wanting
well do you use your computer for uh
just things around the house or in the in the
i use it in my business
i see what do you do
i uh do uh consultation and and testing of various kinds for uh English as a second language programs
oh wow um and uh are these like uh do these programs um
are they are they based on on a on a um
other language or are they based are are they based like a lot of the um i know a lot of the the English as a second language classes will have people from all sorts of you know parts of the world
and the teacher just tries to tries to teach English you know through natural understanding
that's uh exactly what yeah that's the kind of thing i'm working with exactly you seem to be uh better informed than the average person on that
um-hum
well it was just uh when i was high school i worked for the community school and they had a English second language class and it always seemed strange to me that you know all these all these people that you know
spoke English not too well and spoke you know a variety of different languages were all being taught at the same time
um-hum
imagine it's a lot harder on a computer because you have to you know you don't have as many cues you can't don't have hand gestures and things like that
right well now we uh what i use a computer for is to write materials that are later printed though most of the stuff that i do is not uh interactive
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and then i use it for testing uh data analysis on testing so
oh to see how well they retain the vocabulary and things like that
well just actually just uh item analysis statistical analysis of the tests uh
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you know when you when you write a test you have to look at some data from it and see how the different questions are performing
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and find out which ones are discriminating well and which ones aren't find out how reliable the test is you try correlate it with other tests and things of that sort so it's involves a lot of spread sheet use
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yeah i'd imagine so um
so um what were you doing when you were using an Apple two E
well i was doing some of the same stuff but doing it more slowly and with smaller files i can't believe you know i've got uh
five uh megabytes on this one now and on my two E i had a hundred twenty eight K
um-hum it it's amazing
yes it it's amazing you know how how like in the general user community the expectations have just grown so much i remember my first computer was a TRS eighty with four K on it
yeah
and you know and then then i moved and then i started playing with Apples you know and and those had forty eight or you know if if they were really great they had sixty four K you know
oh the old
the old Apple uh the the the original Apple had what yeah forty eight i guess didn't it
uh all i know i know that in my school they had a bunch that had sixteen K on them
is all and there's i remember that there was one game that i played that required forty eight K and there was only one computer that had forty eight K on it at the time
my goodness
uh-huh
and you know it's just so amazing that generally you know if you if you i'm not sure about about um Macintoshes but i know in IBM's you you you generally you know you buy a megabyte at a time
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you know that's that's your low that's the low end
um
well the SE thirty goes up to eight
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but i haven't upgraded it quite that far yet i think probably when i get system seven i may have to do that and and get another possibly another hard disk i don't know they say that system seven uses a lot of memory
um-hum yeah imagine just to support