History of Me, Part I

Okay, so I'm a professional IT guy, but obviously, I wasn't born that way.  For one, IT was a vastly different animal when I was born.  Computers filled rooms (each).  There was nothing Personal about them.  So how did I get involved with computers?


When computers first shrank to a size where they could be come personal, the mid-70's, I was still young, but they quickly caught my eye and my interest.  Some of them didn't even have monitors, just lights or printed output.  In 1978, my Jr. High got the first Apple II computers in the district.  They had all of 32K of RAM and a single 13-sector floppy drive.  I signed up for the first group to get to work with them, and we were one step behind the faculty all the way.  At times, I know we pushed them.  I also formed relationships with electronics stores that started to carry these new, more personal, computers, doing odd jobs like vacuuming the store in exchange for being allowed to use the floor model.  I learned some BASIC programming and read every computer magazine I could find.  Creative Computing was the king back then!

In high school, I continued to take classes dealing with computers.  More BASIC programming, some mark-sense card input, etc.  And in the counselors' office, there was a fancy typewriter with an acoustic modem next to it.  This was for timesharing on the MECC system, and I got hooked!  It was supposed to be educational, but I quickly found multi-user games and chat rooms and dived right in.  We're talking the early 80's, well before any public Internet.  That early foundation lead to later use of IRC chat and many multi-player games once the Internet became available, and eventually to my use of current social media outlets like Twitter and LinkedIn.

All of that early experience was primarily on Apple II-based systems.  I tried a number of alternatives like the TRS-80 system from Tandy and the Commodore Pet and C-64 systems, and in the mid-80's the Apple Macintosh.  I never cared for the Mac; I didn't see the usefulness of the GUI at the time.  After I graduated, I drifted out of computers for a while, not being able to afford one of my own at the time.  I did a stint in the Navy as a Photographer's Mate, but that's a story for another time.