I feel really lucky that my Mom figured computers were going to be important and saved up for a Tandy 1000SL. Lots of memories of GW-Basic, Deskmate, Learning Company games (Rocky’s Boots and Robot Odyssey) and games like King’s Quest IV and Martian Memorandum.

My first console was Intellivision (they later had an awesome special cartridge that’d let games have limited spoken speech in them), then Nintendo (Zelda!) and Genesis. Later milestones like Wolf3D and Doom would appear. There was also a mainframe at one school where I got to play Adventure, hooking me on Interactive Fiction.

I was on a local BBS for many years, chatting with locals, playing MUDs, downloading files. Here’s something to wrap your head around: I remember distinctly the first time I downloaded an image viewer and a photo from the BBS and how cool it was. Imagine a world with no digital cameras, scanners are a rarity and dot matrix printers the norm. It makes sense that photos on a computer in that world would be uncommon, but it seems so strange now.

Eventually e-mail would appear on the BBS (I did FTP by e-mail for a while!) and then a shell, then the internet itself. Netscape only supported a grey background. I remember making my first home page with rainbow dividers. Listening to MOD files and trying to use a tracker…

It’s been quite an evolution of everything these last years hasn’t it?

In elementary/middle school, my parents didn’t want to spend money on a mysterious “computer”… so we used to get some really fancy typewriters from Sears.

While my friends were using file->save and edit->undo, I was literally using 100 sheets of paper to get a 1/2 page typing assignment done… no joke. The best day ever was when my dad came home with one that had this new key called “backspace”… and when you hit it, it would paint over your mistake.

…

Oh well…regardless of the pain it took to rewind, it was still awesome to be able to be in your own personal little world of music, indoors outdoors, where ever.