Drinking the Kool-Aid

My first time with a computer was right around the year 1984.  It was a good year.  My step-mother came home with an Apple IIe because her company was sold, leaving computers up for grabs. It was the obiligatory ecru-cream color  that all units were then and rather chunky when compared to today’s models.  I specifically remember turning on the computer because I had to wait for what seemed like an eternity for it start.  Not sure what my hurry may have been, but patience has never been one of my many, many virtures.  At the time, my Dad was the computer whiz of the family, but mostly because he knew how to turn it on.  He would encourage me to type one of my many stories I liked to write.  For a fourteen year old who spent most of her time outside, climbing the neighbor's tree for sanctuary to write creatively, learning to use a keyboard with letters not in any particular order was daunting at best.  It would take forever just to type up a paragraph with the hunt-n-peck method, and then there's the Apple Dot Matrix printer.  That was a novelty in itself and I can still hear the painful sounds it made.  I did keep trying to use the computer as a means of getting my stories on paper, but needed the ninth grade typing class to pick up the pace. Yes, they actually had typing classes in my day.  It could be said that by transfering my stories from my notebook to paper helped in organizing the structure of my story.  I was able to navigate back and forth through my "writing," not to mention the ease of tapping the delete button to make changes; this is opposed to scratching out what I wrote or starting over. 

There were a few games on the computer, however I mostly had fun with the role-playing games like the Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure.  It was an adventure game where I had to read a story and make decisions for my character that I liked most.  Would he open the door at the bottom of the staircase, or continue on the path that led to yet another locked door? It was a new way for me to read at the time considering I could usually be found with my nose in a book - even in that tree.  However, this was different, I got to respond when asked “What would you like to do?”  I was in control (which I like anyway) of my gaming destiny. These games were pretty much out-dated and replaced with better graphics before my full acclimation, but I was on a roll!  So began my fascination with the computer world.