NaPoWriMo April 27th - a prose poem

Now she calls it the ‘family” IPad 

Now she calls it the “family” IPad.
I offered to get her her own, but no, no, 
she wants to share.
WTF!
PC means personal computer, I say.
The tablet is the daughter of the laptop
and the laptop is the son of the PC.
So tablets are “personal”, not family, I say.
It is all in the lineage.

When I started college in 1975,
we waited in line to get on a key punch machine,
then punched out a stack of green cards,
then dropped the stack off at a window
to run it through the Main Frame.

If there was a command out of order
or a wrong value, or an asterisk misplaced, 
you got the stack back with a print-out, 
found your errors, and did it all again.  
It took hours!
I never saw a football game my whole freshman year.
And the only girls I met were the girls in engineering.
Always in Graham Hall, running programs –
All Saturday long.  
Small wonder I joined the Navy! 

We all shared one big computer then.
I seem to recall they called it Harris.  
But now we are in the era of the individual computer.
No more waiting in line,
no more punching rectangular green cards,
no more dropping off a stack at a window
and hoping it works.

So why would she want to go back to those times? 
I’m getting her a new IPad tomorrow!
The old one is mine.