Our first family computer. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The heavy box with a dial tone that could wake an entire town up as it dials into the internet. I was 5, in kindergarten, and I had only seen the back of my teacher’s desktop computer. Of course, as a child, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near it. That didn’t make it any less intriguing. Now that I had a computer at my house, I could touch it and investigate it all I want. That was my first memory of seeing technology close up. My first memory of USING technology was playing Oregon Trail – one the best computer games of all time. That was my favorite game to play and it was probably the only computer game I could play.

Outside of our new family computer, we didn’t have much technology in our house. We had one cell phone, one TV, and one VHS player(with a billion VHS cassettes). At this time, my father sold computer software for Plato so he was pretty tech savvy for that time in technology. My mother was a receptionist at IBM, so she understood technology since she worked for a computer software company and she had to use a computer along with their software while at work. I started using computers in 3rd grade. We had a computer literacy course that we were required to take until the 6th grade. I was a quick learner and honestly that was my favorite class, besides music. At a very young age, I was fascinated with technology and at one point I actually wanted to have a career in technology; but when the threat of Y2K was looming over the globe, nobody thought technology was going to last.

BOY WERE THEY WRONG!!!