20+ Years of Computers
I first played with computers in high school - we had a brand-new computer lab with Apple ///s. But I ignored them all through college except that the last paper I wrote at UCI was on someone else's computer. I decided them that being able to make changes to the first paragraph when you came up with a great idea when you reached the last paragraph was pretty cool.
Somewhere in the late 80s I inherited my sister's Apple IIe when they upgraded to a MAC! I puttered with using it for writing, but didn't find it very user-friendly. And I got really frustrated when I tried to play games on it.
After that - the big break-through! Grandma & Grandpa Chatham gave us each a good chunk of money one Christmas in the early 90s and I bought a used car and a Mac Powerbook. I was working graveyard at a motor inn and was bringing the computer to work with me. I got online with AOL (or as much as you could get online with AOL then!) I found the romance writers group and the needlework group. (Funny thing - I was a moderator for the needlework group - still have the t-shirt, even! See a pattern?) Then I discovered webpages. And that you could write them yourself. The tools were barely more than plain text, which gave me a good solid understanding of html. My first site was A Regency Repository, a directory of anything of interest to Regency Romance writers and readers, posted at geocities. It's still out there, several revisions and a move or two later.
And learning html lead me to go back to school and specialize in Multimedia Studies. I sold my laptop and bought a Mac 7200. In the labs at school, I learned to work on PCs too, which was very good, because my first job as a web developer was for a company that worked on PCs. So I added a PC to my collection. It's since been replaced with a newer, more powerful Dell.
Currently I have my Dell, and the iMac and PC from the web design company. Friday (after 4 phone calls and 2 tries) a local company that recycles computers came and picked up the Apple IIe, 3 antique Macs, 2 printers, and a box of software for the IIe. I'm slowly, very slowly, decluttering - and I haven't touched any of these in years, even decades. I kept thinking I'd get the IIe up and running, just to see if I could, but it never happened.
Somewhere in the late 80s I inherited my sister's Apple IIe when they upgraded to a MAC! I puttered with using it for writing, but didn't find it very user-friendly. And I got really frustrated when I tried to play games on it.
After that - the big break-through! Grandma & Grandpa Chatham gave us each a good chunk of money one Christmas in the early 90s and I bought a used car and a Mac Powerbook. I was working graveyard at a motor inn and was bringing the computer to work with me. I got online with AOL (or as much as you could get online with AOL then!) I found the romance writers group and the needlework group. (Funny thing - I was a moderator for the needlework group - still have the t-shirt, even! See a pattern?) Then I discovered webpages. And that you could write them yourself. The tools were barely more than plain text, which gave me a good solid understanding of html. My first site was A Regency Repository, a directory of anything of interest to Regency Romance writers and readers, posted at geocities. It's still out there, several revisions and a move or two later.
And learning html lead me to go back to school and specialize in Multimedia Studies. I sold my laptop and bought a Mac 7200. In the labs at school, I learned to work on PCs too, which was very good, because my first job as a web developer was for a company that worked on PCs. So I added a PC to my collection. It's since been replaced with a newer, more powerful Dell.
Currently I have my Dell, and the iMac and PC from the web design company. Friday (after 4 phone calls and 2 tries) a local company that recycles computers came and picked up the Apple IIe, 3 antique Macs, 2 printers, and a box of software for the IIe. I'm slowly, very slowly, decluttering - and I haven't touched any of these in years, even decades. I kept thinking I'd get the IIe up and running, just to see if I could, but it never happened.
posted by Kristen | 11:25 PM
4 Comments:
Oh yes. I remember how empowered I felt writing my own web pages in the mid-90s. And for a while there I got quite precious when the early html tools became available -- it wasn't 'real' programming.
I still have my Apple IIe floppy disks and I can't bring myself to get rid of them. I'm a "collector" of unusable junk.
Bless you for recycling. In the early days we recycled old computers for homebound kids so they could "talk" with other kids their own ages. Now everyone has a computer so I don't know what they do with them.
How funny! We have a "graveyard" for pc's in my attic. Pieces and parts habby just can't get rid of... *grin*
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