I guess for the start of this year-long 365 computer/tech post challenge I have set for myself, it’s only fair that for the first post, I start at the very beginning. My beginning as a computer geek. The first computer I ever touched was a TRS-80 Model I computer. It was in the Remedial Education class my friend’s mother taught in high school. We went up to the classroom because she needed something and the minute I got there I saw this weird TV-looking boxy thing on a table at the far end of the room and asked what that was.

“It’s our class computer.” replied the other teacher, Ms. Havlicek. A very kind older woman that also taught the class.

“You have a computer!?” I replied, as she caught the fascinated look on my young face.

“Would you like to see it?”

I think I about nodded my head off as she led me to the magic box. We sat at the desk in front of this almost mystical device and I watched her put a cassette tape into a tape player next to it. That’s how you loaded programs?! Weird. She loaded the first program, a game for me to play.

It was called Space Warp.

I was hooked. Noticing and nurturing my interest, Ms. Havlicek and my friend’s mom told me that they would like some help with the computer and asked if I would like to learn more about this wondrous machine so I could give them a break and help the kids from their class with using it. I agreed instantly.

And thus it was that these two great and wonderful ladies helped steer me straight into my destiny; always encouraging me along the path I would follow all my life. A Geek’s Life™.

The year was 1981 and I was 15 years old.

I learned how to use the computer and spent every spare moment I had in it’s company when I didn’t have a class or someone wasn’t using it. My study-halls were always spent in that classroom as I helped the teachers, the other kids and myself unlock it and my potential. I not only learned how to load the programs and use the computer but soon began to create programs on it myself. Many, many programs; it was the first computer I ever programmed (and it certainly wasn’t the last.) The TRS-80’s Tandy Basic was my first programming language and the sky was the limit. (Provided I stayed under the 4k and later 16k limit of the computer’s memory.)

Follow up:

The Christmas after, at the local K-Mart I was shocked to see them selling a computer; a Commodore Vic-20. It was another computer-in-a-keyboard like the TRS-80 but this computer had cool sound and… COLOR?! Oh. My. God! COLOR?! The TRS-80 I learned on had huge chunky white blobs on a black screen for “graphics” and monotone beeps for “sound.” This had great sound and COLOR?!

I drooled. I panted. I learned all I could about it and even by talking about it to people that walked by when I gazed at it in wonder, managed to sell 4 of them in a day. Even though I didn’t work there.

I had to have it. But, it was way too expensive at $188. I talked about it to my mother. I begged, I pleaded and I’m reasonably sure I drooled a lot. Christmas was coming and I don’t know why, but for some reason I still thought dreams coming true were possible. $188 was a lot of money back then and we kids have never gotten anything, especially one gift that cost that much. But what they hell, even though it killed me to be denied, I kept on pleading. Begging. Drooling.

And Mom bought it for me for Christmas. I was there when she did and kept touching the box to my first computer all the way home. It was beyond a Christmas miracle. Did I mention (a) it was my destiny and (b) how much Mom rocks or ( c) maybe she just wanted me to stop drooling?

And thus, the Commodore Vic-20 was the first computer I ever owned. I spent many hours typing in programs just to have them disappear in the ether as I hit the off switch. I didn’t have money yet for the tape drive to store programs on so anytime I wanted to use it at first, I had to type in the program I wanted to use from scratch. Only to have it all go away again if I had to turn the computer off or there was a power failure.

It wasn’t that long until I pushed the computer to it’s limits and then bought a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a computer. It was my first 16-bit computer. Later I moved on to the Commodore 64, then years later bought a Commodore 128 and later a friend of mine got me onto the Dark Side by telling me we could build an IBM PC clone for about $700 and that was that, baby!

That’s one post down.

So what was your first computer experience?