Early Computer Years

One of the first early experiences I had of using an computer came when I was in 3rd grade. I went to a very small private school, so they did not get them until then. I remember they were apple computers that had just came out that had the colored plastic on the backs of their monitors. I remember always wanting to go to computer class so I could play the different games that we had, which were mostly educational but I didn't really think about it. They had lemmings, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, Oregon Trail, and Math Munchers among others.

I remember playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego during class a lot as well. It taught you geography while you solved different "cases." I also remember playing mavis beacon. It is a typing tutor program that had practice pages as well as typing games to test your progress. After you completed to a certain point for the day we would have free time to play what we wanted. Sometimes we would have races in the race car part of mavis beacon to see who could type the fastest.

My first experience on the internet came when I finally talked my dad into using one of the one thousand AOL free trial discs that we had. At the time it was for 14 days, and I was excited about the endless possibilities I could explore online. I ended up mainly just talking on instant messenger with people from school as the connection was so slow it took for ever to visit any page. Since it was dial-up and used our phone line I did not get to use it very much without getting yelled at for keeping the line busy. At the time I really thought of it as just a different means of entertainment, and never could have imagined how big of a role in plays in my daily activities.

The first time my computer crashed and made me lose major work is something that I will always remember. It was my junior year here at Appalachian State and I was working on lab for my geo-computation class, which is a kind of computer programming based in the software I use in my major. I had spent three hours working on a program to select particular entities in a database depending on what the user selected as the criteria. I had finished all the major coding and was working on making the interface and controls look smooth and just some visual modifications when my computer made a loud buzzing sound and shut off. I hadn't saved in about two hours so I lost all of my work and almost keyboard because I slammed my hands down on to it when I realized all the work I was going to have to re-do. Needless to say now I am very attentive to saving regularly.