Remebering Our First Computer

It’s my second 25th in three days (my sister says the buck stops at 25) but I never really thought of what that meant until I had a conversation with my boyfriend about my family’s first personal computer. The thing is, people born past the 80’s will never know the wonder and amazement that comes with seeing and using your first personal computer when you’ve never even heard of it before.

I was 5 or 6 (or 7 or 8, I don’t quite remember, we’ve already established that I’m getting old right?) when my dad told us we were getting a personal computer and neither I nor my sisters had any notion of what a computer was supposed to be or do (or maybe I should just speak for me. In any case, I think I was half expecting something that resembled R2D2). When the delivery guys brought the computer to our house, it came in three baffling pieces. My sisters and I immediately laid claims to the three separate parts (we didn’t understand that you actually had to hook everything together); my eldest sister got first dibs on the monitor since it was very TV-like, my other sister took the keyboard since it had lots of clicky, pressy things, and, being the youngest, I got stuck with the most uninteresting piece, the CPU, with only two measly buttons to play with.

baby me, other faces have been changed to protect the innocent

We were all a bit sore when the computer guy took our parts away from us and put the computer together. We got over it though, when we realized that the sum was greater than the parts. You could play games (like galaxian, moonbugs and round42. I was too panicky to actually play the games by myself so my dad would take care of the controls while I just pressed the space bar as fast as I possibly could)! You got to feel like a super techie as you inserted the floppy disk after floppy disk to play your games (you had to put in the DOS boot disk at the right moment to boot the computer before you could do anything)! You could type stuff and make text drawings in the text editor! I even remember how excited we got when my dad showed us a personalized DOS boot disk he had made for us that displayed “Hello Tina, Karina and Tetaw! Please take care of this computer” for a few seconds after booting (it was like the computer knew who we were!!).

You crazy kids with your internets and applepods will probably roll your eyes at this. But the thing is, I don’t think you will ever experience the same level of awe and wonder at your digital picture-snappers, wireless telephone machines or any of your new-fangled gadgets as we did when we first laid eyes on our first personal computer.