- When did your family get your first computer?
that’s cute. Computers weren’t around when I grew up. Well, there were a few, but they were super expensive and didn’t do shit.
- What type of computer was it?
In 7th grade.. so this is about 1984-ish – I took a computer programming class. we had 2 computers. They were both radio shack TRS-80s. it had a black screen, that only had one color font… orange. It couldn’t do graphics. You could only write 4 or 5 lines of code to make your name scroll across the screen. It was stuff like this
10 – show name: name equals “kevin rules”
20 – go to 10
30 – end
That was the beginning, and ending, of my computer programming days. Keep in mind, this was bad ass cutting edge technology. I can not tell you I had the vision that this would be in every home. That was no internet at this time. So, computers weren’t connected. They didn’t store music, or play music, or even show pictures. The big deal was they could do complex math. However, that too was lost on me. See, if you wanted to get the computer to add 80 plus 3 plus 13… you had to write 36 lines of code. “See, it’s simple” some asshat next to me would say. Sorry, Melvin, I’ll just use my Burroughs adding machine, instead. You may know it by its modern parlance, the calculator. Oh, and it’s on my watch.
See, in the 80s, when we weren’t fighting the Russkies, we were playing video games on our watches. This was a big deal, and everyone had one.
- What were your favorite things to do on your first computer?
well, lemme get to the heart of the question. My first personal computer was a hand me down from my mom. it was a windows 95 machine. It was awesome! I was hooked, instantly. Even though the internet sucked back then, and search pages were USELESS. Seriously, before google, search pages had no value. They didn’t know what to search for. plus, early web writers didn’t know how to write their pages so they could be easily indexed. I had given up on search pages, and I remember the wifey told me about google. She said it worked, and I didn’t believe her for months.
So, what did I do with our first computer? Looked for games, music, and nekkid women. same as today.
- When did you/your family first connect to the Internet?
I had the internet in college (1990) but it sucked. I only used computers for typing out papers. email was around, but it was laborious, and you couldn’t share files. i had email through school. My email address was something like Klang332453323Lang@nau.edu.az.com.spaz Doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue. Oh, and we had a modem! I mean, a real modem. When you put your phone on the cradle and it used the telephone to very slowly talk to the internet. Oh, and then there was this incident shortly after college.
- How did you spend time online when you first connected?
looking for music, games, and nekkid women. it hasn’t changed a ton. This is the game we played. It was crude and it was basic and it was AWESOME. it was called ‘choplifter’.
I am Correct 