We never had video games, though I got pretty good at computer-based Tetris; the Mac II, with some extra RAM and an external hard drive (140MB to supplement the built-in 16MB), became my computer in high school. School-wise, we had Apple II-series computers in elementary school, and I learned some BASIC programming (and touch-typing) in 4th and 5th grades. In 6th grade, my school merged with two other local schools, and those of us in the independent accelerated math program were asked to help set up the computers in the new building.

I didn’t really start using computers and internet for anything beyond games, research, and typing until I got to college, and I didn’t get sucked into blogging until halfway through my first year of grad school. And now I write on three blogs and have flickr and two abandoned photo sites…

(btw, nicely appropriate captcha, seeing as I work with chicken embryos…)

Another one was Boris, an electronic chess set that even provided feedback (”Interesting…” and “Are you rated?”). This fit into a nice wooden box and the pieces were placed on the board and moved manually. I still have it and play it occassionaly, but I’ve never won.

Ah, the halcyon days of the 1970’s, when computer technology was just starting to enter our households. How quaint, simple, and charming they seem now.

As for Oregon Trail, school wouldn’t have been the same without it. Interestingly, my step-sister-in-law, who is still in high school, played it when she was in elementary school, too. It sounds a little fancier now. Maybe it’s in color?

Thanks for the fun post!

Though I believe I’m part of Generation X (late 30s), in 4th grade my school had a black-and-white, CRS (?) from Radio Shack, I think, on which we learned how to program some things like Basic. The “Run” function sounds somewhat familiar.

My freshman year of college we had Macs in the computer lab that looked a lot more like the Vectrex electronic game I had at home. It, too, had a black-and-white screen and we were expected to type papers on it. No, thanks! I wouldn’t say that was the reason I dropped out, but by the time I went back to college, Windows and IE were firmly in place, and alas, the card catalogs had disappeared from the library.

I was an “early adopter” of technology, though I didn’t have any of the tech games of the 80s because we were poor (Oh how I wanted Merlin and Simon, but toys like that were absolutely not a priority to my art/reading-minded mom). I never got into video games much, though I rocked the house at Centipede.

I’ve been online for more than ten years, I built my own computer 6 years ago, taught myself html back before it was “cool” and it was just dorky, and am working on running a system that is all open source. But I still pale in comparison to real coders and programmers.

Thank gawd for geocaching - I wanted a GPS unti something fierce, but I had no idea what I would do with it! Now I know…