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Saturday, December 27, 2014

Year 2014 in review - nine years of blogging

Thomas Kraemer as Simpson cartoon character PHOTO: See previous post Thomas Kraemer as Simpson cartoon (8/7/07)

Thomas Kraemer 2014
PHOTO: Thomas Kraemer still alive and still merry at the end of 2014, but with more white hair and much blinder and weaker than he was last year!

Thomas Kraemer in front of snow covered Japanese garden Nov. 2010

PHOTO: Thomas Kraemer, in November 2010, sitting in front of his snow covered Japanese garden. This was a record early snowfall for Corvallis, Oregon. He was still able to enjoy the snowfall, despite having suffered a few months before an ischemic stroke in the posterior cerebral artery territory of his right brain that worsened his low vision blindness,. (See my previous post Signs and symptoms due to stroke (9/18/10))

Bill Gates and Paul Allen using Model 33 Teletype

PHOTO: My favorite photo in the history of computer technology is of Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen using a Model 33 Teletype machine connected via a 110 bit per second telephone modem to a central timesharing computer system. I guess the photo was taken in the late 1960s or early 1970s based on the age of the boys and the vintage of the computer technology. This photo made me recall how the term "booting up" a computer originated from the old adage of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" in reference to how computers had to be started up in the days of Teletype machines. Early computers had little if any permanent memory and they required a small program entered manually in binary via the computer's front panel switches, or by using the punched paper tape reader of a Teletype machine, so that the computer's operating system could then be loaded from a magnetic tape drive or hard drive. This short piece of punched paper tape was commonly called the "bootstrap loader program" because it resembled a leather bootstrap and it was figuratively being used to pull up the computer by its own bootstraps. The Teletype used mechanical fingers and electrical contacts to sense the rows of up to eight punched holes in the paper tape as it was mechanically fed through its reader -- each punched hole representing a binary bit and each row a byte. See previous posts My first blog posting (4/15/06) and Windows XP R.I.P. and Bill Gates using Teletype circa 1970's (4/12/14)

I started my first blog in 2006 Thomas Kraemer Blog and wrote 1,554 Posts through 2011, before starting my current blog in 2012, Tom's OSU blog, where I've written another 200 posts, including this one. I have been slowed down considerably by multiple ischemic strokes over the last few years and therefore hope and pray that I can continue posting long enough to celebrate my tenth year of blogging next year. As I've said before, I blog largely because it provides a wonderful Google searchable memory of interesting things I've read instead of blogging as some people do just for ego gratification.

This is my 200th post in this blog and in the event I am unable to blog throughout next year, I decided to list both my favorite posts of 2014 below, in addition to some links from previous posts made over the last 9 years:

Listed below are my previous annual reviews:

Some other posts from previous years:

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