2001-08-15 - 11:11 a.m.

no one

i remember shortly after we got our first computer, (a compaq desktop with 128 K of RAM and no hard drive. this thing ran Microsoft Word 1.0. shudder.) we sat my grandmother down in front of a simple biorhythms program. it asked her for her date of birth. being a touch-typist from the days of gigantic manual typewriters, she entered the year using an l (lowercase "L") instead of a 1 (one). this is because on those old typewriters there was no one key. it looked the same as the L, so everyone just used that. anyway, the program comes back with one of those incredibly helpful error messages like "invalid date, you were never born" or something. it took us like five minutes of grandma re-typing it before i finally typed it. then she said "what's that key doing over there?" pointing at the one. i learned to touch-type on a computer, so it really just amazed me that at any point there was no one on a keyboard.

really a pointless little story, but i just remembered it and inflicted it on you.