When did you become a computer user?

I'm usually here to discuss consoles, so to mix it up a bit, I thought
I'd talk about the computer end of the spectrum. RGVC is a good place
to bring this up, since we have a really unique group of guys here (I
can say that, right? I think the last of the ladies left several
moons ago...). We're all tech geeks of some sort or another, and
we're unique in that, in this particular forum, we're almost all old
enough to remember a world that wasn't dominated by personal
computers. Even the youngest of us can probably remember a time when
only one out of six houses had a computer, and if you needed to use
one, you'd have to go to a library, or even a college just to see
one. Even if we started using computers at a very young age, we were
still old enough to be able to REMEMBER being taught. I get the
impression that anyone born after 1990 won't remember learning how to
use a mouse any more than we remember taking our first step.

So... what introduced you to computers? When I was a kid (let's say,
five years old, and this would have been 1986) I knew *about*
computers, in that big companies used them to print out bills and
stuff, but I never had the chance to really be up close to one. That
all changed when I was in 4th grade. Our class had been issued a
computer (I think it was an Apple IIgs) and each kid would get a turn
at it once a month. When your "turn" came, you could opt out of
class, and sit at the back of the room, on the computer, all day!
Pretty wild by today's standards, but I guess in the 80s sitting on
your *** playing "Oregon Trail" was considered educational, since you
were learning to use the computer. I ended up having an advantage--
my terrible handwriting! I can't hand-write anything. So, my
teacher, in a moment of frustration, taught me how to use the Apple
Word Processor, which up until that point only he knew how to use.
Suddenly, I was a computer wizard amongst my Math Blastering peers!
The Word Processor was high-tech grown-up software, and so I must be
the computer king!

In hindsight, I don't think I've been able to shake that label since
fourth grade. Heh, I even had another teacher that thought he was
brilliant-- when I acted up, he'd "punish" me by making me miss
recess, and "force" me to sit on my *** playing video games. The
clod never even thought that maybe I'd RATHER be in front of a
computer any day! LOL

That's about when my interest was really piqued. I went to the school
library to find computer books, but I was really disappointed to see
that they were all about programming! At the time, this didn't help
me at all, since our computers were already pre-programmed! I didn't
know much, but I could see that the future of software lay in the MUIs
and GUIs like the Apple had, not in sitting around typing your own
programs! Ironically, today when I'm looking at computer books, I'm
annoyed that there are so few good programming books, and every other
titles is "Windows XP for Complete Fucking Retards".

It was about a year after that that I got a Tandy 1000 HX, my first
system and one that taught me a lot about computers... mostly, because
it was hopelessly outdated when I bought it, and the list of things it
couldn't do was endless. So, I learned A) how to make the most out of
what you have and B) how to respect your limitations. We kept the
Tandy for about 5 years, and around 1994 we started hearing about how
people could use their phone lines to connect to other computers. We
went to Rat Shack and ordered a modem, which never arrived, since the
local RS was run by a real sleezeball. I wouldn't get onto the
Internet until sometime in 1996, when we bought our first Windows PC.
I'd loved computers for years, but that was the first time I'd been
able to play with then-current technology. With Windows 95 and my
shiny new CD-ROM drive, I was ready to conquer the internet (I'll tell
you how that's going any day now... ;-) )

Now it's over ten years since then, and my family has had half a dozen
desktops, at least that many laptops, and I'm carrying around flash
drives bigger than my first HDD. My love of computers continues, as
I've just added a Mac Mini to the home ( I plan on hooking it up to my
HDTV and making a video editing station out of it)

And to think, if I had decent handwriting, this probably never would
have happened.


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Aaron J. Bossig

http://www.GodsLabRat.com

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