Recently, Mary Ann asked me for some thoughts on computers and I have to admit, I had to think about. My computer is a fundamental tool in my everyday life. I use it for school. I use it for work. I use it for leisure time entertainment. I use it for my news. I use it for communicating both personally and professionally. If you were to give me the option of taking away my television or my computer, it’s the computer that I would choose, every single time.
Staying On Top Of Things
I remember the first computer I received. I was just 12 years old – so that would make it sometime around 1984-1985. That computer was a Commodore 64. My parents broke the bank that year to give me a computer for Christmas. I was in seventh heaven. I was able to type up my research papers on the computer and correct them before printing them out on my dot matrix printer – how state of the art is that?
It would be another five years before I got a PC. I was 18 at the time and my first PC was this very slow, clunker of a machine. I loved it. I wrote my first novella on that machine. I developed several storylines and pitches for the amateur press association that I was a member of. I also started college that year and joined the college newspaper.
The Macintosh
This was my first exposure to a Macintosh and what an adorable, fantastic machine. I loved going into the paper to write on the computers there. There was also one machine in the office with a massive 21 inch monitor (back then, this was huge) and we used that for doing the newspaper layout. I spent the next 18 months mastering the use of these computers including this great little program called Adobe PageMaker.
By the time I was 21, I picked up my first high speed PC that also had a modem. I could get online. Not that there was a lot of online to get on. I logged into a friend’s BBS system where I could babble with many of our other friends. I could also log onto America Online where I discovered chat rooms.
That as they say, is all she wrote. From that moment forward, several life altering decisions occurred. I enjoyed role-playing in one of the online chat rooms. Playing characters allowed me to meet many other people of like minds. One of those people I met actually worked at America Online and he helped me to get a job interview.
That job interview is the reason I moved from Texas to Virginia. It would also be just four short months after that interview and getting the job that I met the man I would marry. Computers became more and more fundamental in my everyday life. I can honestly say that 15 years ago, I didn’t ‘need’ a computer.
Today – ‘need’ is definitely winning out over ‘greed’ because I need my computer for all the reasons I described at the beginning of this blog. Can you trace the history of your relationship with your computer?
Heather Long also blogs on fitness, marriage and Disney