My History with Computers and the Internet

The first memory I have of using a computer goes back to elementary school. I guess I was in kindergarten or first grade, but my mom would take my brother and me to the library to get books and we would always play games on the computers they had there. I don’t remember what the names of the games were, but I do remember the huge floppy disks that we used in the really old Apple computers that were used back then.

Later in elementary school, I remember using computers in the classroom to play some of the best games ever made: Oregon Trail and Tetris. Everyone in my class always wanted to play. We thought computers were so cool! I’m sure there was another reason for the computers in the classroom, for some school related purpose, but I can’t remember because all we cared about as kids were the games and fun stuff we could do with the computers. Outside of school, I remember having a computer at home that only had some kind of word processor and some games that we used to play a lot.

The first time I remember using the Internet was when I got to middle school. Around sixth or seventh grade, I remember we got Internet at my house and a new computer that might have been a Dell because that was back when Dell was popular and they had the “Dude, you gotta get a Dell” guy in their commercials. We had the AOL service provider because that was also what everybody was using at the time and it was also dial-up which was horrible. My friends from school and I started to instant message each other when we were not at school since that was a new thing too. The first computer class I had to take in school was in eighth grade as part of the state’s end-of-grade testing and to test our proficiency before going to high school. We had to learn about all the Microsoft Office software and programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel and we also had to practice typing using a typing program.

In high school, we switched to high speed internet when we moved into our new house my freshman year. I remember mp3 players becoming popular and so my brother downloaded Napster and we began downloading music for our mp3 player that would hold like 50 songs. All throughout high school we were using the Internet on a daily basis for school work and personal use. Napster got in trouble for copyright issues and so we had to stop using it, but then my brother just downloaded Limewire instead. He also found eBaum’s world which was the start of using the internet for videos and pictures and other stupid, funny things before there was YouTube. My dad got the first laptop (a Dell Inspiron) we ever had when he thought he was starting a business and never did, so when I went to college, I used that until last Christmas when I got a new Dell Inspiron because the old one became a piece of crap.

It’s pretty amazing to look back at the progression from Apple’s and floppy disks to laptops and high speed internet and the 10-12 years that it all happened while I was in school. Everything changed so fast and was 10 times better every time they came up with something new. It was hard to stay up to date with the speed that technology was improving at and it is still changing today.