Computer History

I'm using this post as scratch where I will jot down my "computer history". I want to do this now before my memory is more fuzzy than it is today.

I was, by some standards, a late comer to computers. In the mid/late 70s I would spend hours at Sears playing pong on the Atari Tele-Games console. And, I do mean hours. My father did not want a computer in the house at that time and so we never bought one, but I always had an interest in them.

So, when I came to college (UNC-CH) I took an intro computer class. We worked on Apple][e and wrote programs in Pascal. I still have the print outs somewhere.

In the mid-80s I worked for a temp position for a couple of months in the Pathology department. The head of the dept. (whose initials were D.O.A.) bought the researchers a Mac. (The guy I worked for directly disliked it and didn't feel it was a "real" computer.) I messed with it quite a bit and got quite handy with it in a short time. That would be the last time I would use a Mac.

At work, we had one or two ATs and XTs that were shared and I used to fool around with them in off hours. I decided circa 1991 to start a databse of CD holdings for WUNC using an early db system called PCF or PC-File. Sad to say, we still use it to this day, or at least I do!

The first computer to reside inside my home would not arrive until 1993 (!); it was a used IBM XT with green monitor that was sparking to pink from time to time. It had a 1200 baud (I think) modem and I used it primarily to play in MOOs, access work email, and to look around at things via gopher, telnet and other pre-WWW methods.

Sometime around 1994 or 5, a friend, Randy Perry, who worked at a computer store, called me up because the store was going out of business and they were selling the whole inventory - cheap. I rushed down to the store, but the 386 he was holding for me had been sold. So, I got a Compaq 286 with a b&w monitor, and some incredibly small HD like around 20 meg. It booted to DOS and I ran Windows 3.1 on it. Around this time I started usign Netscape 1.0 (or maybe as early as 0.94 beta - I don't know) and was using NetTerm to telnet into MOOs. I was a customer of nando.net, set up by the New & Obsever paper in Raleigh.

(to be edited and continued later)