Computer History and Me

Due to me once again being cut off from the Internet last night, I had several thoughts about computers and me. Not having access to the normal things that I would have done or used the Internet for last night (and every time that it happens here in the Internet provider dessert of middle Nebraska), I had to do other things. Haha, Like click the 'connect' button a 1,000 or more times just to see if it would actually connect this time. Or the other thought – where can I go to borrow someone else's connection?

Of course this made me start to think about my computer and in turn where it all started for me...

Way back in time, when I was in 3^rd or 4^th grade, my Dad made a most amazing purchase. He bought us a TRS-80 computer. Wow! This was such an exciting object. Never before had there been such a thing in our house. :D It was beautiful. It was magical. It had a monitor. It had a keyboard. And of course it had a cassette player. The TRS-80 only had 2 K of memory. Simple, ordinary e-mails we send out now are bigger than 2 K.

With the computer my Dad had also gotten a game. It was saved on a cassette tape. This game was a text adventure where we had to use clues to work our way through a haunted house. :D The name of the game was Haunted House. It was the most awesome thing I had known. My family and I spent hours in front of that computer trying to come up with the one or two word commands to type that would move us to the next part of the game.

get rope

take rope

use rope

throw rope

tie rope

drop rope

It was love. :D I was hooked. Computers were cool. Now, I am not sure exactly why or for whom my Dad purchased the computer. But we all seemed to enjoy it.

The computer came also with a manual to learn BASIC, which is really what the computer was for. We only had the one game you see. Over the next few months or maybe a year, my Dad worked his way through that BASIC manual. He taught himself how to program that computer to do things. During this time he made a couple more games for us, saving them on a different cassette. One of the games was Tic Tac Toe. We would play against the computer. It was not possible to beat the computer in this game. You could only hope to tie the computer. Dad also wrote a sub search text game. It was similar to our Haunted House game, with fewer details to be worked out. I seem to vaguely remember a few more things that Dad programmed but can't tell you anymore what they were.

In the back of the BASIC manual there were several programs that one could type into the computer, sample programs I would call them. I remember one of our favorites. It was our favorite for a couple of reasons; first, it was one of the shortest programs to type in – typing was not one of mine or my brothers skills at the time, and second, it was awesome. The typing was careful work. It took a long time. Often when I was finished and ran the program I found that it did not work. Somewhere I had typed something wrong or forgot something. But once you had typed all those many characters into the computer you could sit and watch as the screen was lit up, randomly, pixel by pixel. My brothers and I loved to watch this. The funny thing is that it took hours for this to happen. So we would sit and watch at it started. Then we would go outside or somewhere to play, coming back every so often to check the monitor. We did not want to miss the end when the last few pixels where lit up.

Over the next couple of years of my life I sat at the computer with that manual and taught myself how to program. I was learning another language, and this language let me communicate with the computer. I could cause things to happen. :D

10 print “Hello Lisa”

20 end

This is where my new found computer skills merged with my love of writing. My brother, Jason, and I liked to read 'Choose your own adventure' books. I could see how these books were exactly like the 'Haunted House' game. There was an amount of text followed by a question, a choice that had to be made. So I started to write my own choose your own adventure stories. This was followed by the code to put them on the computer. By now I was in the Big Room (6^th - 8^th grade) at school in Worms. Someone had donated a TRS-80 computer to us. OH YEAH! So in my free time I was also able to type my stories in for my friends at school. Those were great days. :D

Then came high school. In high school computers we were learning how to use a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, and of course BASIC. I was happy in the computer lab. I remember the day I first used a mouse. Boy was that exciting! We had purchased a new computer at school. We, the students, sold Christmas wreaths each year to help fund our computer lab. And that year with the money we made we got to add a new computer to our lab. It was an Apple 2GS, and it had a mouse... none of us had seen or used a mouse before. This was an exciting day. There was a game, or application on that computer to help teach you to use the mouse. Flying around on the screen were several flies. You had to move the mouse around to click on these flies. This of course would kill that fly and you could move on to the next. :D Mousing skills...

There was another exciting addition to my computer world while I was in high school. This was MODEM. Now we could actually talk to someone else on the computer anywhere in the world. YAY! I was a senior. We had probably used our wreath money to buy this modem, though I am not sure about that. My math teacher had been for years offering classes through the community college to us. This way as juniors or seniors we could take some Gen Ed's during the summer and have a head start on college. I took a couple of those classes during the summer, an American History class and a English class. But then during my senior year, Mrs. C. told me that she was going to have programming class and was offering it to us. Todd and I signed up for that one. We both loved programming. So the two of us went back to our high school one evening a week that spring to work on this class. It was one of these nights that Mrs. C. put the modem into the computer in our classroom. She was so excited about it and of course wanted to show us, her computer nerd students how it worked.

Well, of course there were not many places that you could go with this wondrous piece of technology. One place we could have went was the ESU. But that was a long distance phone call, something that couldn't be wasted on playing around with students. And I am sure that there wasn't a whole lot of stuff to do or see there anyhow. So lucky for us, that one of our IBM computer was sitting in the Shop classroom and the other was in the computer lab. And even more lucky for us was the fact that there was a telephone line in each of these classrooms. So Todd went down to the Shop and I sat in the computer lab. And we used to those modems to sit at opposite ends of our school and talk to each other. :D

In college I was majoring in computer science. So of course I had a lot of time on the computer. I was in one of the two labs in our computer building, or over at the lab in the library often. Though, I never used a modem during this time. College came and went. The one notable thing to mention here is that I used my student loan money to buy myself a computer my last year of college. Haha. That was a good thing, my own computer.

Then I came back home and got my first teaching job. During those years, Deseray was still in college down at UNL. I went down there to visit her as often as I could. Those were great days, filled with all sorts of exciting things. We would often sit (in the middle of the night) in the computer lab in her dorm. She had discovered something, something it took no time at all for me to come to love. That was lambda moo. That was programmer geek's heaven. That was my Haunted House game in REAL LIFE. I met people from all over the country. I made all sorts of things. I ordered virtual pizzas and blew virtual bubbles. I wandered around room after room of amazing places created out of so many people's imagination. I needed to buy myself a modem.

It did not take me long to get that done. I put that card in my computer. And then I could 'talk' to Deseray anytime I wanted, even though we were 100 miles away from each other. And best of all, it wasn't even a long distance phone call. It took me a month to realize that the minutes that my provider allowed for me to use on my 'plan' was not enough time. I checked my money, and learned just how much more I was willing to spend on extra minutes. Then I was careful about how and when I used those treasured minutes. There are many things that I could say about those lambda moo days of my life.

Computers and the ability to connect to people with them had shaped my life. Here we jump ahead. Then I was one of the few using this technology. Now nearly everyone does. The web – www.anything.com, e-mail, Facebook, blogging. Wow the list is endless. I use my computer and the Internet for so many things during the day. And at least for me it all started with my Dad and a TRS-80 computer when I was in the third grade.