Another FFAF is upon us? Where did April go?
Just the other day, I was thinking about how I’ve been an Internet surfer for only nine years. I never had a home computer till I was in college, and as a commuting student, I’d spend the hours between classes in the computer labs chatting on the now-defunct theglobe.com and making really bad personal webpages on Geocities.
But this is supposed to be about my first computer experience, and for that, we need to go back a few more years.
In grammar school, we played The Oregon Trail on Apple II E’s with monochrome screens. Looking back, that seems really primitive, but at the time, I didn’t care. Here was a computer, and I got to play with it! Ok, perhaps “play” isn’t the terminology my teacher would’ve liked to hear it described as, but whatever I learned about the Oregon Trail all those years ago has escaped my brain. What sticks is the image of the wagon train on the screen… the greenish/yellowish cast of the screen… the clacking of the keys under my fingers… the giant floppy disk and drive.
This early introduction to computers was the first time my seemingly innate ability with them got to display itself. I’m not very good at explaining to others (read: Mom) how to use one, but I’ve managed to figure out some interesting computer-related things in the course of my life. My favorite - and no, I’m not counting The Sims 2 - is blogging and web design.
Now, at 26, I spend way too many hours every day surfing and blogging and designing new layouts. But I think the grade-schooler inside me is smiling about it, remembering her days in that classroom on the Apple.
