Computers of my life 

I've been a tech geek all my life.  And I was fortunate enough to be born into the first generation of the personal computer.  Herewith, a personal history of Computers I Have Owned.  (Sorry in advance for the crummy image/text flow; I blame blogging software that crashes when I try to realign and move the images I placed poorly the first time.  Resize your browser window until it's readable.  Thank you.)

 These first few aren't computers I owned, but I certainly felt proprietary about them.  There were no computers in my elementary schooling, so when I got to GPS in 1977, I immediately gravitated toward the Tandy TRS-80 Model I (with cassette tape drive!) housed in the library.  I learned just about all my basic (BASIC) programming skills on it.  What kind of programs I was writing -- I have no idea.

In the eighth-grade hallway, upstairs in the junior-high building, was the computer lab with its half-dozen Apple ]['s.  Color screens!  Five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drives!  My friends and I spent as much time as we could in there, next to the classroom of our algebra teacher, an affable young woman with a shock of curly red hair.  I do remember a couple of programs I wrote on these.  One was a kind of rudimentary bulletin board system that required my friends to put in the same disk and store a message for another later to retrieve.  One displayed the text: "This program is a tribute to the great band JOURNEY!"  Then it drew a picture of a road disappearing into a horizon with the word JOURNEY in the sky, all in those huge blocky pixels we thought were the height of graphic excellence.  I also played a lot of Apple Panic.

Around 1980 or so, my parents got us kids a Commodore 64 for Christmas.  We did some noodling around with the much-vaunted (at that time) sprite graphics, but mostly we created database systems that catalogued our albums, cassette tapes, books, and so forth.  The game cartridge I remember most was Choplifter, a helicopter game where you were supposed to land to rescue people from the burning buildings and carry them to safety.  But it was a lot more fun to set the buildings on fire with your machine-gun fire, then strafe the refugees as they fled in panic.  Come to think of it, I'm not sure why the chopper had guns in the first place.  We bought several commercial games for the C-64, including a wonderful winter Olympics game that is still the best biathlon simulation I've ever seen.  The faster you skied, the more your racing heartbeat made your gunsight bob up and down as you tried to shoot.  Its realism was not matched by the freestyle skijumping portion, in which the computer made wacky synthesizer noises as you attempted various goony-birds and ollies or whatever they call those moves.

Upstairs in my dad's office, meanwhile, was the Compaq Portable -- the only computer in the house with a modem (attached to the business phone, which had a separate line).  I spent hours upon hours every week, whenever I was home without the parents, dialing up BBSes in range of a local call.  Kids, back before the World Wide Web, we had to rely on numbers copied down from fliers on telephone poles, that hopefully led somewhere on that board to a list of other BBSes and their numbers, just so you'd have somewhere to go with your modem. Getting yourself a logon to one of those systems required the personal approval of a sysop.  And I can say from personal experience that if your request revealed female gender, the sysop and all his online buddies would be very welcoming.  Mostly people uploaded and downloaded games and other little utility programs, and of course left each other messages.  Something about that mediated communication was irresistible to me.  I was always indifferent to talking on the phone, but I loved BBSing with a passion.

The first computer that was all mine was this Apple //c that I took to Wake Forest in my junior year.  I still have a lot of the papers I printed on its dot-matrix peripheral.  It was the last gasp of the 5.25" floppy (check out that internal drive!), and by the time I took it to Athens after graduation, I had acquired a 3.5" external drive.  AppleWorks and that monochrome green-on-black screen were all I needed.  This was for work, not for play -- I don't remember having any games at all, let alone a modem.  For online access, I went to the computer lab at the library.  Of course, there was still no WWW, so what I mean by "online" is research database from a server somewhere in the basement, and a partial card catalog.

My next few computers were all hand-me-downs from my older brother, who had the good sense to work for several Apple-friendly computer concerns after getting his degree at Georgia Tech.  This is the Mac Portable, my first real Mac.  I got it secondhand from Dwayne in about 1991.  It weighed a ton -- like the Compaq Portable, it was only portable in the sense that you could carry it all in one piece, by an integrated handle, if you were a strapping individual who had been training on fifty-pound bags hay bales.  Both computers were affectionately termed "Luggables" by their partisans.  No backlight on this LCD screen, so you could only use it with a strong desk lamp trained right over it.

I still have this one on the left, in a closet somewhere.  The PowerBook 100, the very first Apple laptop.  A backlit (if monochrome) screen was quite a luxury at that time.  Pretty sure this was the first machine I ran System 7 on.

On the right is perhaps my favorite computer that I've ever owned, a PowerBook Duo 210.  It was an ultraportable -- thinner than my spiral notebooks, a measly four pounds.  You docked it to get access to peripherals.  I got this one from Dwayne in 1996 or so, and kept it on the dining room table in my Charlottesville apartment with a 56K modem attached.  It was monochrome and wouldn't run a graphical web browser, so I did everything with Lynx, the text-based browser.  (I made up for it with my internet usage at work, mostly keeping up with The Spot, the first fake web reality show.)

We arrived in Conway simultaneously with our first color-screen (and color-encased) computer, this "Rev C" blueberry iMac.  It served us well until we got our current desktop, the "swivel" iMac, in 2003.  

My greatest computer-related regret is that I never owned a classic Mac all-in-one, although I worked on a ton of them editing the Old Gold and Black and writing my master's thesis.  I wish I had one just to store in the attic.  That happy-Mac startup icon still makes me feel ahead of the curve.

Posted: Monday - July 02, 2007 at 04:39 PM         |