My company gave me a computer back in the 90s so have no attachment or recall. But for my kids, I got an AT&T, which my wife got from her company at a steep discount in 1998. I used it a lot.
First computer tales
- Thread starter qwerty
- Start date
Dad bought a RS TRS-80 way before the schools got them. I'm not sure how/why because we were pretty poor. I was all excited and enrolled in some programming classes to learn BASIC. I then discovered a text-based Zork game and had no time for learning anymore!
We had one of those growing up. My dad made it very clear that we were NOT to push the bright red button while he was using it. It rebooted the machine, I think.
Many years later it wound up in the attic, and then it was time to dispose of it. We decided to toss it out the window rather than carry it down 3 flights of stairs. Didn't ever crack, though left a pretty deep crater in the yard!
My parents bought our first computer (Gateway) and it looked a lot like this. It got a ton of use.
Mine looked a lot like the one pictured above but per my son, it was an AT&T Globalyst 360 (?). I could not find an image of that but the Gateway looks so similar I went with it.
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I bought my first PC in 1998 (39 years old). Never had a reason to have one prior to that even though I had been thinking about it for a long time.
I had a word processor my first year in Ames. My (now) wife admits she was jealous because she only had a typewriter.
I remember that my first English class (no idea on the class number anymore) was one of the first English classes that had access to the internet in class.
Yeah, only thing that would have been cool before that would have been games, but I had my various game systems. Really just got my first one once the internet was something I thought I needed.
Lotus 1-2-3 doesn't get enough credit for how much it increased productivity. Changed history.
The PC gets all the credit, and deservedly so. But L123 was probably the first "killer app".
I grew up with an old gateway windows 95 machine, not sure on the specs. Parents were pretty anti-video game, but they would let me play educational stuff. I distinctly remember Number Munchers and the ms dos Oregon Trail.
I would also stare at the maze screensaver and feel like I was playing a game.
I would also stare at the maze screensaver and feel like I was playing a game.
First computer I saw at junior high school was also a teletype like set up with pin drive paper roll printing out what was happening at the actual computer at the Community College a couple of counties away.
We were styling when my high school got an Apple IIe - three of them actually! Got to take my first programming class on them. BASIC commands are still stuck in my head. I will also never forget what BASIC stands for: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I can still hear my math/computer teacher with the lame "Yes, it is rather code in here isn't it?" that he would always say after anyone answered what BASIC stood for.
I was NOT a good typist in college. It saved me when we got one of these. I wrote several papers on it and had three lines to catch and correct mistakes before it printed. What a lifesaver.
I remember marveling at the technology. Now it is a dinosaur.
As a freshman at ISU in 1987, I showed up with a laptop computer. It was a major stretch financially but I convinced my parents that I needed it. It was the envy of the fraternity, and it was shared quite a bit.
Sophomore year, my girlfriend's parents told her that if she didn't achieve better than a 2.5 GPA, they were going to have her come home and attend the community college. As summer approached, the outlook wasn't good....As luck would have it, my roommate happened to work part time at the ISU printing office. He brought me a clean set of about 8 blank report cards all still connected at the perforated edges, and with the sprocket holes to fit my dot-matrix printer. I then had to create a document with all of the fields lined up just right so that everything would print in the correct location on the report card. On the last attempt, things lined up not quite right, but close enough. Sealed it up the 2.8 GPA using the ironing board and delivered it to the girlfriend. We still keep in touch, and to this day, her parents have no idea.
In hindsight, my roommate and I could have probably had a lucrative side hustle committing forgery...
Sophomore year, my girlfriend's parents told her that if she didn't achieve better than a 2.5 GPA, they were going to have her come home and attend the community college. As summer approached, the outlook wasn't good....As luck would have it, my roommate happened to work part time at the ISU printing office. He brought me a clean set of about 8 blank report cards all still connected at the perforated edges, and with the sprocket holes to fit my dot-matrix printer. I then had to create a document with all of the fields lined up just right so that everything would print in the correct location on the report card. On the last attempt, things lined up not quite right, but close enough. Sealed it up the 2.8 GPA using the ironing board and delivered it to the girlfriend. We still keep in touch, and to this day, her parents have no idea.
In hindsight, my roommate and I could have probably had a lucrative side hustle committing forgery...
