I've been doing computer things for a long time.
I remember when my brother received a Commodore 64 computer for his birthday one year. He was so excited because it came with a cassette tape drive and we would spend 30 minutes loading the Blue Max space shuttle trench run game so that he could play it and I could watch and that I could play it sometimes. It was a fun game, but it was limited in what you could do and the boss at the end was very hard to defeat! We had spent many hours playing on our original Atari game system. Space invaders was my favorite because I had become so time-synced with the space invaders that I could sit and play it indefinitely on my joystick and big console TV at home.
After I got my own Commodore 64 in college I remember using a heat transfer printer to print my essay for a college class. I had typed up, saved, edited, and printed my college class essay using the GeoWorks software which was early "what you see is what you get" document editing. I remember arguing with my professor of the class that double-spaced and 14 point font on heat transfer paper was the same as doublespaced on a typewriter. And I remember another professor at University of Central Florida bragging about how she had gotten a 1 MB hard drive and how it was soooo big and how excited she was.
I carry 2 TB of storage in my pocket last time I counted.
I remember using America Online dial-up. I remember using CompuServe. I remember dialing into servers using the telephone line and downloading software that was pirated from other sources.
What brought all of this up? I received a T-shirt on my birthday that had the Commodore 64 logo on it it brought back a lot of memories. Good memories! But a lot of them.
I remember being my apartment in Orlando while attending University of Central Florida and calling my girlfriend (eventually my wife) and my mother in law and playing for them the three voice harmony that I had programmed using peek and poke commands in my Commodore 64. It was an amazing achievement on my part but probably didn't rank very high in other people's eyes. They laughed and were encouraging. And my wife has continued to be encouraging ever since then.
Now I tinker on my phone and make it do cool things. I tried to convince my iPad and my Apple iPhone from work to do cool things and often I succeed but sometimes I'm blocked by my employers security.
I love tinkering with computers! They're so much fun.
