You have died of dysentery: A Retrospective on My Life with Computers, 1984 - 1996

I've been working with computer for almost 15 years. I did not plan for this, and I did not necessarily study to work with computers, but then again, when I was in college, a job industry working with computers barely existed.

As with most humans my age, my history with computers began with a Commodore 64 in a school classroom. Sure, we did some school work on the computer, but most of the time it was Oregon Trail. Before I left the sixth grade, I had died of dysentery, typhoid or cholera many times. I'm not sure I ever made it to Oregon.

At some point my parents purchased an Apple 2GS. I think I used it for basic word processing stuff and playing a game called Bard's Tale. This game had great pictures of fantastical creatures with wonderful scripted options like this:

Before you, you see 1 Grey dragon. 

Will your stalwart band choose to Fight or Run?  

 Honestly, this was a lot more exciting at the time. And the actual fighting hadn't even started. I know, riveting. See, look here:

Notice the grey dragon graphics.

I don't remember where or when I got back into computers, but I remember my parents purchasing an IBM PS/1 with a 386 processor (I believe) and something like 2 MB of RAM. I think it also had a 2400 Baud modem. The modems were still pretty new. The internet didn't exist in its current form, but there were things called Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes. They were often computers or servers set up at someone's home or business where you could dial directly in using your modem. You had to enter the phone number on your computer and click Connect or Dial. And in a few moments you had that loud screeching sound followed by some small clicks. I think that's all called a handshake.

My Speech and English teacher in high school had a BBS set up at the high school. I dialed into it and played some basic turn-based war games with pretty much only five other people in my small town. At the time there was always the anxiety of someone in my household picking up the phone and severing the modem connection.

This is what a BBS menu looked like:

My teacher was also the first person to introduce me to the pre-browser Internet, or as we called it then, the World Wide Web. It was off the hook.

I took my IBM PS/1 with me to college. I really didn't see myself as a computer nerd, because I simply didn't know as much as other people did about them. I loved doing stuff on computers. I enjoyed having them, playing games on them, but I didn't know how to do stuff per se.

For the most part, that changed in college. I met some friends and formed a computer club. Yeah, that's right, we started Asbury College's first computer club.  Once we sent an email to a missionary in Russia using BBS systems. It only took around 3-4 days. We were so excited.

While at college, my fellow computer geek friends forced me to learn how to stuff on my computer beyond the  basic Windows 3.1 interface. I say force because they would mess with my computer while I was gone. Since Windows was still based on DOS, most of my friends knew how to mess around in DOS. They would get into DOS, change my folder structures, icons, etc. Oh, it was a hoot. So I learned. More and more.

We would often spend Friday nights in my friend's room on his computer, downloading files from a BBS in Texas. My friend had a faster modem, 14,4000, I believe. Oh, it screamed, baby. We downloaded a 3D video animation of the bird drinking water in only 3 hours. So see, I remember what it was like to really suffer.

Everything until graduate school was a blur of games like Duke Nuke'em, Lemmings, and I think later there was some Wolfenstein and Doom. Everything I learned about computers at that time was inspired by boredom or just trial-and-error. If something didn't work, I would try to figure out what was wrong. Or I would have some of smarter friends try to figure it out.

Oh, and how could I forget the dot matrix printers? This was a time when there was actual manual labor involved in loading paper in a printer. You had to line up the holes in the easy-to-perforate paper on the rollers. And then you had to roll the paper to a certain place so the printing started in the right area.

And then you had to hope and pray (literally and figuratively) that during your hour long printing session  there wasn't the horrifying, tardy-to-class producing printer jams. A print job on a dot matrix printer requires military vigilance. You can't leave. You can't get distracted by conversations with others. If that perforated scrolling edges starts to crimp up, the edges may start to tear off, and then the paper itself starts folding up and creasing, it's a profanity-laden disaster of ink and paper. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it's on par with the Hindenburg disaster.

An aside: I attended a conservative Methodist college. People may joke about laying hands on printers and praying for them, but it happened. Oh yes it did.