Remembering Memory
When I was nine and in my last year of primary school, my class was asked by Mr. Shadbolt to write an autobiography, containing all our memories of our life. At least thats what I heard. It was actually meant to be a story about our life at school, but I twisted his words a bit.
I wrote mine on my family's (that is, mine and my mothers - my father and brother had a much more powerful 386) IBM XT in FirstWord. I printed it out and using the skills I developed in a bookmaking class bound it into a nice little book. It had about twenty or so pages. The original document was saved on a 5'1/2" floppy, labeled 'Tommy 2'.
The day after I handed it in it came back to me with a Principals Sticker on it and a summons to talk to her about it in her office. This wasnt made clear to me until I was actually sitting on a couch in her office, her sitting behind her desk.
She said she was astonished that I could remember such specific details from my childhood, as early as 2-3 years old. I included memories from even earlier but these I had stated were probably from my imagination, created from photographs I looked at after I had devoured every book available to me as a young child.
I immediately responded with, "Come on, surely you must remember what you did when you were that age?"
She sent me back to my home room.
Later on, I revised that to include my Form 1 (Year 7) year that I had spent at a boarding school. I updated it one rainy weekend using Q. It had so many klugy formatting codes embedded in it from the original FirstWord document that I stripped them out using the handy MID$ function from Qbasic.
That edition was never printed. It will be somewhere on the hard disks that sit neatly on a shelf in my mum's downstairs study, which she keeps in case I ever remember my childhood 14 letter PGP passphrase.