I’m moving out of my parents’ house and I don’t care enough about the computer to take it with me, and I don’t even have a cell phone in sight. The shared apartment has an answering machine for this purpose
The ZX81 is already gathering dust in the closet or basement. I played around a lot with its successor, a Schneider/Amstrad CPC, and learned more programming and stuff. It’s a game, a hobby that I enjoy. But there’s no telling whether I would ever need it for anything, or even seriously use a computer for anything. I was never really interested in the games on it.
So when I start my community service and move out of my parents’ house and into my first shared apartment (“civilian shared apartment”), the computer isn’t important enough to me to take it with me. It stays with my parents and then sits in a box in my father’s basement for several years.
Of course, there is no cell phone yet. My shared apartment has a shared telephone and an answering machine! A real additional box with two cassettes in it, one with our announcement on it, one for recording calls. My parents don’t have that yet, and I think it’s great. We have a lot of fun constantly recording new greetings for the answering machine.
The shared telephone also has a charge meter, probably a “Fee Display 77”. There is a booklet next to the community telephone in which we have to enter the meter reading at the beginning and end of each telephone call. At the end of the month, we add up how much everyone has to pay for the telephone bill. Of course, every month there are a few incorrect units that we forget to write down and which are divided between us.
(Written in March 2024. From the perspective of the year 2024, it seems almost unbelievable to me that there was a time when the computer was so unimportant to me and not an everyday item that I didn’t find it necessary to take it with me. Or is That’s actually not entirely true, because now, in 2024, when there are smartphones, your own PC or laptop will become less important again and it would perhaps be almost conceivable for me to be able to get by in everyday life with just a smartphone instead of a laptop.)
(Molinarius)