Computer history for Kara Roisum

Being the ripe ol' age of 42, I used to think that I was older than the computer until Louie had us reading up on the history of the Internet. I feel better now knowing that the computer has been around longer than I have been. Looking back, I now realize that without knowing it, I was using a computer long before we called them computers. My fondest memories are of traveling with my family to a skiing resort in Cable, Wisconsin, where on the second floor, one could play a classic game of Pong. Long after the parents were half immersed in their Bloody Marys and Manhattans, my cousins and I would begin our tournament play. The best thing I remember about that game was that if one was patient and waited until the game was almost over, one could simply rub their feet on the carpet and tap their room key on the console, thereby electrifying the game into starting again. Thus, despite its quarter that it cost to play, we contributed no more than $2.00 to the upkeep of this game. It was fabulous!

As far as the actual computer goes, I didn't really meet up with a desktop until I was a junior in high school where my school was lucky enough to create a lab full of Commodores - 64s if memory serves me correctly. Each year when I talk to my young students about computers, I have a difficult time getting them to understand exactly what these computers did. They have no understanding of turning on a machine and just seeing the DOS window. I try to explain how my math class spent days, devising flow charts so that we could program the computer to do something for us. "Do what?" they always ask. "I don't know," I respond, "spit out some information or something." They have no clue, and I find that forming words to what exactly that computer did always fail me.

Similar to John's first computer, my younger brother was the real computer geek of the family. He still talks about the Apple IIe he had way back in '84. I remember him playing hours of Zelda on it. I swear he told me that when all was said and done he must have invested $2000 into that machine. He loved it that much that just recently he found a place to purchase the games that came on that clunker. He was a computer geek at a young age and a loner to boot, so I fondly remember him playing for hours and hours on that thing. I, on the other hand, had way too much going on in my life, between sports, boys, and parties so didn't see the potential nor the advantages of computers. Wow, how wrong I was!

The only other significant memory I have is working on computers in college, which had really, in retrospect, come along way since my junior year in high school. By that time we were working on Apples, I think, and typing essays on Bank Street Writer, a rather sophisticated word processing software. It was a miracle for me because up until then I was doing all my work on my IBM electric typewriter - a rather expensive graduation gift from my parents. The amazing thing about that machine was its ability to "erase" mistakes with its correct tape. Wow! Anyway, so when I finally got my hands on Bank Street, I thought the Second Coming had happened. Imagine being able to word process my papers on a computer and then print them, mistake-free, on a dot-matrix printer. Of course, it wasn't an easy as I've described it; one had to "tell" Bank Street how to format the essay. I can no longer remember the exact commands, but I do recall having to use the function keys and typing in commands for making text bold, for example, or beginning a new paragraph. Now that I think of it, it reminds me of many of the commands I teach my 5th graders when writing simple HTML pages.

I laugh to think what my students might say 30 years from now when they, too, describe their first experiences with the computer. I wonder if they will observe the same glassy-eyed stares from their younger audience, along with the sweet, incomprehension that I frequently get.