my brother Thomas, the resident computer guy (i hate using "geek" for family) found an interesting anthology/blog project called Newly Digital...bloggers/writers are contributing stories of their first computer and/or online experiences. so, here is my story:
I attended a newly constructed, 'hi-tech' grade school complete with extra wide hallways, elevators, indoor waterfall wall, can lights, and a "Media Center" fitted with four or five Commadore 64's by '80. Before you were allowed to use them, you had to pass a written and oral exam on proper computer usage; how to load the floppies, turn on the monitor...and don't forget to 'ground' yourself by touching the metal filing cabinet! I had a dispute with the "New Technologies" teacher, he was an overbearing creep, and I refused to ask for help when learning a new program (mainly Oregon Trail and Typing lessons)...I just kept working on it 'til I got it. I was a hands-on learner in fourth grade, still am. I handed in my perfect score mandatory computer usage test. I never asked him a single question, this guy who thought, not so secretly, that computers were really for boys/men. Well, my presence in the computer room continued to bug him to no end, so my mom got called in for a "Parent-Teacher Conference"....she thought he was a jerk too. I'll never forget the look on his face when she basically told him to get bent. We got a Commadore 64 of our own at home a few weeks later. (The "Media Center" upgraded to Apple II's when I was in fifth grade, we followed suit at home).
A few years later, when the Commadore and Atari machines in the rec room proved only useful for Frogger and Pong, mom bought a Macintosh (if memory serves me) sometime in '85, which she used at her knitting shop to create a mailing list and postcard mailings...she had just closed her graphic design business a year or two prior so she was familiar with how computers (particularly Apples) were being used for layouts, type, etc. After school, I laboriously entered address after address in that basic data program (feeling so very important and business like for a 12 year old) and tried to keep the little holes of the (specially ordered from out of town) label paper lined up in that giant printer. God, how that printer chewed up those little perferated sides.
From then, a few PC errors aside, its been a happy Apple family..I took out a loan (mom co-signed) to get my first, a PowerMac, when I was living on my own. I dutifully made each payment even when the computer was obsolete. I was online in '95 at home, the only others who had email at the time were usually college student friends or folks who worked for government...lots of addresses that ended in .edu and .gov. Surfing the internet, I found most often college archives, history information, reports and studies...interesting stuff, I could write research papers at home! Not cheap though, our ISP was still by the minute. (which my guy at the time didn't mind spending on dirty messages with the girl he left me for! very Oprah meets World Wide Web). Around the same time, I was studying graphic design at a local tech college that had a pretty amazing computer lab..including an Iris printer and ...a scanner! The sign in sheet was three or four pages long. When I ran out of money for supplies, including the incredible ZIP (you could store HOW MUCH?!) disks...mom always sent a check.
My mom was the one to make sure I (and my siblings of course) got access to computers, to introduce their use in her workplace and in our home, to understand they could be used in the visual arts...and to this day, she says, they work "by magic".