Statio Mentis

We all have these memories, where we were when something big happened. For example, we probably all remember where we were, when 9/11 happened. I myself were working at Stockmann, and remember the exact time and place where I was when I first heard about it.

So far so good, but now the geeky stuff enters the picture. I happened to read a history of microprocessors from Maximum PC and began to think what memories I had of those and especially what places i combined with the memories of those specific processors. And not to my geeky surprise, I could find some fond memories to pretty much all of them excluding the very first one, since I was not born when it was first introduced. For example I associate the first Pentium P75 chip to a certain part of the city and to a certain person, who lived there and got the first P75 I knew. Or I connect 286 chip to a certain other fellow, who was building his house and I helped him in some minor tasks. He had a computer with one inside and I got to play some King’s Quest I as a reward with it! Or yet I remember my first PC, which was a 386SX 16 MHz (was not my first computer, but my first PC), lying on the floor at our home back then, when I was installing more memory to it with my father. A whooping 2 megabytes! I could even play Doom with it, with a screen sized as a stamp.

How fascinating it is, that our memory seems to work by associating things to places. No wonder we are guided to do that combining by memory experts, if we really want to remember something. It’s then easy to get it back also, by returning to the place we associate with the memory. Now if we cant remember the place then… I found it invigorating to make such a trip to my memories, so I urge you to do the same, perhaps it’ll spin something nice in your thoughts and bring a smile to your face.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 23:41 and is filed under Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.