Saturday, February 1, 2020


A subject that I find intriguing. Especially when I live in a world, where friends kids usually have computers in school: and I find it amazing that schools are able to offer that.

The way that my family got our first computer, basically owes to one of my mother’s friends, and how much her son had improved at school, and that she should get my older brother a computer. I have no freaking idea how our mother could afford such a machine.

In practice though, my brother didn’t really care that much for computers until well into the Pentium era, and ma didn’t really care much for computers herself until the late ‘90s. Thus, I had the advantage of a computer and little competition for its use.

As a child, typically the computer to me was a place to play games. I couldn’t read yet, and no one really understood computers very well, so it was hard to get a lot out of MS-DOS 3. But it was easy enough for us to learn the procedure for using floppies, and most of our diskettes had the associated command written on the label.

A few of these games, were purely entertainment. Like a Japanese based thing that could shift between robot / jet / car, or whatever; and Jeopardy. Most games however were more educational: math problems like making change, and dividing ingredients, and stuff like that. I probably moved a frog through a maze or painted interstellar space with wormholes a ridiculous amount of times, but most of the games were school related.

In fact: until compatible software started to become difficult to find in the mid~late ‘90s, most of our diskettes came from school supply stores with a software section.

As it turned out, I would basically be using computers since before kindergarten. Eventually though, Internet access via Web TV, and the usefulness of general purpose Pentium machines with modems, is where I really started to care about computers.

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