Daily writing prompt

Write about your first computer.

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I’m one of those Millennial kids whose childhood had a BC/AD split. I was more or less oblivious to computers in the early and mid-1990s: though they were present in our elementary classrooms, none of my teachers used them. I remember once in maybe sixth grade there was a period where we used floppy disks to play some edutainment game that involved a barn. It was that same year (1996 or thereabouts) that my best friend G held a party at his house, and those who wanted to use the word processor program on his computer to type our book reports could: all I remember is a blue screen and white text. That night he showed off the modem and logged in to something that was …..a chatroom with medieval-fantasy visuals, I think? I’ve asked him about this and he can’t remember any specifics. The concept of the internet fascinated me, and two years later when my next-door neighbor moved in and we became friends, he and I would “surf the web” together, typing in websites we’d found on boxes and books (I literally kept a notebook to record URLs like scholastic.com and Whitehouse.com and boy did that last one teach me the importance of domain suffixes). As I remember, we mostly hung out in Yahoo chatrooms, because back then they were all that and a bag of chips. (Can I get an amen from the 1990s kids? After you crack your back and take your pills for the evening, I mean. ) In 1998 I dropped band to take computer classes because (1) I didn’t want to play the tuba, those things are huge but the director was a tyrant and (2) computers were coool. That’s probably one of the better decisions I ever made, because my ability to type and use keyboard shortcuts has much of the library-visiting public that I am a wizard. Anyhoo, it was either in late ’98 or late ’99 that my parents bought a computer, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion.

Although I enjoyed using computers very much, I was not an adolescent techie, so I can’t tell you anything about its specs. It was a Walmart entry-level machine, and the only thing I remember about it is that it had a 9-GB hard drive. I remember this because I quickly became a computer gamer, and it didn’t take long for me to enter “Oh, you want to install this game? You have to uninstall something else” territory. At first, we weren’t online, so the first few months were amusingly primitive. The computer came with Microsoft Encarta, which I was obsessed with: I would spend hours just reading articles, and then play the games that came with it. I was much awed by the panoramic photos included, and disappointed that I couldn’t access web links. Some things I could read, but not understand: I felt certain that Creedence Clearwater Revival sounded like some kind of event, maybe like Woodstock, but the program kept returning images of a band. (CCR would eventually become one of my favorite bands, once I realized they were the artists behind several ‘oldies’ I liked, and was able to explore their offerings via software like limewire.) My first proper computer game was Star Trek: Hidden Evil, which…..oh, boy. I’m very nostalgic for several Star Trek games from this period (ST Armada and ST Elite Force), but Hidden Evil aiiiiiiiiiin’t one of them. (Strictly speaking, SimCIty 2000 was my first PC game, but I played it on a Walmart display computer.) When we first got online, it was by using “free” ISPs like FreeI and Netzero: I remember the later because it made me listen to an Avril music video while dialing in. It’s software would limit the user to two hours per day, buuuuuut I figured out that I could copy the ISP phone number, then use Microsoft’s network program to dial in and enjoy internet with no Netzero clutter and no limits.

That Pavilion is the only machine I’ve ever owned (well, used in its case, since it was a family machine) that I wasn’t able to save the data off of. It “died” at some point and I was given a Medion computer for Christmas in either 2004 or 2005, which “died” in turn in 2009. (I say “died” because it was probably just a power supply issue, buuuuuuuuut I was young and knew nothing about PC hardware.) However ,that Pavilion introduced me to whole new worlds, both online and off: I got into game modding because of The Sims 1, exploring its files and realizing I could replace the default pajamas with downloaded “skins” (clothing) by giving the downloads a particular file name. It gave me confidence in using computers, in manipulating them to do interesting things. I have fond memories of using Homebuilder and Geocities to create websites: my geocities effort was just me and HTML, as I remember. (I still remember enough to impress my coworkers. And for my next trick, anchor tags! Ooh, la la!) I don’t think Gen-Z and Gen-A’s will be able to appreciate the sheer novelty of the internet: it was a different place entirely, a place we wanted to escape to rather than from. It wasn’t omniscient: it was this ethereal domain where we could explore, tinker, etc — not be drowned in ads and unfortunate tweets.