Whidden Wanderings by Ray Whidden

Welcome to my blog, a word I hate but it's forced it's way into our vocabulary and I suppose we're stuck with it and since I can't come up with a better one that every one instantaneously adopts, enough whining. I've had other homes on the free web and lets hope this one, like Yahoo, sticks around longer than Webjump and Angelfire.

My interests are computers, an industry I've worked in since 1967 when I worked for Honeywell Information Systems (HIS) when a mainframe computer was 16 K bytes, a control panel so you punched buttons for the register, memory address and memory contents (keyboards came around a few years later), 4800' reel tape drives (disk drives also came a few years later), card readers, card reader/punches, paper tape readers, paper tape reader/punches, drum printers and magnetic drum mass data storage.

I now do phone tech support in a major Edmonton call center but won't be going to Dell who are currently hiring for their midnight shift.

I lived for 30+ years in the Toronto area but have been living in Edmonton for the past four years.

As well as working in computers, I work with computers in my genealogy hobby and currently finishing off the database in preparation of a final draft of a Whidden genealogy expected to be 1,300 + pages with CD-ROM including photos and research material.

I invite readers to drop by and leave your comments.

Cheers, Ray
Edmonton, Alberta
celebrating 100 years as a province in 2005
February, 2005