A couple of years later, a dozen or so IBM PCs were installed in my senior English classroom in high school. Our class got to spend a couple of weeks working with them, and then we moved into other classrooms to resume our regular studies while other classes had their turns with them. I don't remember exactly what we did in class, but I do remember that we were allowed to return to the room after school in the afternoon and use the computers. I played with Flight Simulator, which rekindled an interest in flying that I had several years earlier. And if not for an extreme susceptibility to motion sickness and a general dislike of air travel, I'd probably be a pilot today.
Fast forward through my college years, when a lack of money and a lack of parental enthusiasm for personal computing led to many late nights of pounding out papers on a Smith-Corona typewriter. Computing in the mid-to-late eighties for me meant doing exercises on the Plato system, running statistics through the Apple IIe in the physics study room, and going down to one of the computer labs in Keller Hall in the wee small awful of the early morning so I could use the terminals to run biological simulations on the mainframe.
![[Photo: Tandy 1000 RL]](tandy-rl.gif)
After graduating in 1990, I started working full time and earned
enough money to buy myself a Tandy 1000 RL for Christmas -- 9.54
MHz of smoking 8086 power, Deskmate, Tandy enhanced CGA, a
720K floppy drive, and one expansion slot. Okay, I didn't know
any better, but at the time, It was what I wanted -- a basic,
relatively inexpensive entry level computer that I could learn
on.
Along with it I bought a 1200 bps modem and a 9-pin dot matrix printer. The next day or so, I bought my first software package -- Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0, which I was delighted to find actually ran in color under TCGA. Over the months that followed, I added a 40 MB hard drive, increased RAM up to the system maximum of 768 KB, and upgraded to a 2400 bps modem. I started a subscription to PCM, a magazine geared to Tandy owners (which no longer seems to be published).
I bought that system to learn, and learn I did. I learned I should never buy a computer like that ever again. More importantly, I learned MS-DOS. Yeah, the learning curve was a bit steep at first. But it really wasn't that hard. Once I learned some basic commands, figured out how directories work, and picked up on some of the conventions, using a PC became easy and fun. It wasn't long before I could see the workings of DOS inside of applications, and in so doing gained insight into what those applications were doing. Knowledge of DOS lets me manipulate the system, create my own shortcuts, perform simple and basic tasks without taking my hands off the keyboard to reach for a mouse, and do something as simple and useful as view ASCII text files without having to start an application. I enjoy the feeling of empowerment and control, and miss it when I use computers that try to hide the nitty-gritty stuff behind the scenes.
Of course, we studied about the nature of information, and how to analyze it, organize it, store it, transport it, and retrieve it. I also became interested in how humans interact with computers.
This was also the time I was first introduced to the Internet. The faculty at the library school felt that e-mail was such an important communications tool that all incoming students were automatically given accounts on the university's Internet-connected Unix system. We thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. We e-mailed each other, played with early information-finding tools like gopher and archie, transferred files back and forth, telnetted to far-flung library catalogs, signed up for electronic forums to eavesdrop on discussions between real working librarians, and spent hours reading and sending messages in Usenet newsgroups. Eventually, I got a little burnt out on it for a while, but the experience gave me enough perspective to avoid get caught up in the hype that surrounded the Internet when it came into widespread prominence a few years later.
Back then, the university's link to the rest of the Internet was a T-1 line, which could move 1.5 Mbps, and was rarely filled to capacity. The hottest new thing in telecommunications was a service called Switched-56, which let businesses have high-speed 56 kbps data connectivity on an as-needed basis. A decade later, I signed up for cable modem service, giving me a 2 Mbps connection, because dial-up service, at nearly 56 kbps, was just too slow.
I first started learning how to create web pages back around 1995. After my first crude personal home page got found by an Internet search site and was thus accessible to the world, I quickly became serious about designing a web site that I didn't mind people looking at. That was the beginning of this web site in its current form.