Question about England

[beatrice_otter]

Sarah Gardner, former host to Osiris. After Chimera, if she wanted to go back home to England and do something to reaffirm her roots and childhood and all the stuff she did before she seriously got into archaeology/Egyptology and the path that led her to becoming a host, what would she do? Where would she go? I don't need specifics, just general things like where would be a good place to feel really British.

ETA: I'm assuming that Sarah and Daniel worked together in the late 80's-early 90's, given that he was born in 1965 and already had an international reputation when he and Sarah first met (assuming she did her grad work in England). What technology/computer access would have been available to them in academia? Would they still have written things out by hand and had them typed, or would they have had computers?

Comments

Computing in Academia in the '80's

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

I graduated college in 1980, and went on to grad school in Classical Art and Archaeology in 1981, while my husband went to med. school. Although some of the more science-y and technologically advanced folk were getting into personal computing then, mostly with Commodore 64s, and Apples. Academia went more to the Apple end of things then, because there were discount deals available to academia. My father, who is a professional writer, and was an English prof. (in Creative Writing) had an IBM PC by 1984 which allowed him to do word processing. His machine was IBM because Burlington, VT was an IBM town, due to University connections with the IBM factory in Essex Junction. When I was in grad school only the more tech-y profs used computers for their word processing, but those who did were hard at work convincing those who did not of the virtues of being able to avoid white-out and retyping. Archy types, as a rule were slow adopters, although there a number of notable and eager adopters too.


We had moved to Burlington by 1985 for my husband's residency, and on an intern's salary, like a grad. student's, we had very little disposable income. I banked all my dividend checks for a year in order to give him a bank account to get himself a computer for Christmas of 1986, because he enjoyed programming. He was able to by an IBM PC used from an IBM employee who was upgrading to one of the new models that ran the first version of Windows. Our machine had 128K of RAM, and ran DOS 1.2. And it was DEFINITELY the era of the desktop. Portability was not big, and data was stored on the big 5 inch floppies, although the Apples and Windows machines of the era used the new 3.5 inch floppies. Our computer games were text only, although primitive graphical games were available for more sophisticated machines. Doom was an amazement of(unpleasant)graphical dazzlement when it came out in the late 80's or early 90's (dunno the date, but I bet that would be easy to find out online).

So if you think Daniel is a tech-y type (and he would appear to be while at the SGC) then he might have had a personal computer in the late 80's or early 90's, especially if he could have some financial help from Nick to buy the thing and used the university's academic discount, but otherwise, on a grad. student, teaching assistant, or lecturer's budget, he would have had to decide to place buying the computer over buying books for his library, and that would mean buying some 20-40 fewer books that year, depending on price. My sense is that Daniel would have trouble passing over that copy of Early Sumerian and Assyrian Cylindar Seals for something that he could type out by hand himself on the IBM Selectric that he bought from Professor Higgins when Higgins got a grant that allowed him to buy that computer.

Colleges and Universities did have computer centers available for the use of students and faculty, but there were limited hours and resources available, and what each facility had could differ widely according to endowment and size of institution. I would bet that the University of Chicago was one of the more forward thinking institutions in that regard.

Hope this helps, even though it is a little before the precise time period that you would be writing about.

Re: Computing in Academia in the '80's

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you so much!