Remember those really big floppy disks?

Isn't it amazing how much time we all spend online nowadays? I don't know about you, but it seems like 2 hours of my day outside of work is spent online. I can say that I'm doing online banking and reading e-books, but who am I kidding? Most of that time is messing around on FB, this blog, e-mail, searching the web, and reading other people's blogs.

What did we do before this technology?

I was born in 1978, which coincides with being a young tot and having the first "computers" come on the market for home consumers. I say "computers" because my first "computer" was a TI-99. The TI-99 was really Texas Instrument's take on the Atari and Intellivision (now it sounds like a graphing calculator), but they called it a computer even though it was really a gaming system that you could program in BASIC. I was 5 years old, and I'm no genius child programmer, so I was using that thing for the games! Yeah, they were educational games mostly, but heck they were the most interesting things in the house so I replayed them. Eventually I got old enough that I got "fun" games - TI's version of Pac Man and Asteroids, which I played non-stop.

When I was about 9, I got my first real computer. By today's standards, it was a complete piece of crap. You had to boot the computer with the boot disk, which was a BIG floppy disk (5.25"). Just to boot it up took 5 minutes. Of course it was DOS-based, and you had to load any application with 1 or 2 of those huge floppies. It's not like those floppies held much data at all. I remember a standard pinball game - nothing fancy, orange on a black screen. That floppy was always accessed and churning as I racked up the pinball points. As a lover of game shows, I had all the game shows on big floppies: Wheel of Fortune, Classic Concentration, Family Feud. I think I need a multiple personality disorder evaluation because I'd always play multiple players and take turns being Joe Bob, Beth & Carly. Beth always won...hmmmm

Other than playing a ridiculous number of computer games (I stayed home all summer by myself all day...we're talking 20-30 hours of computer time a week), I would also write. I had some cheap-o word processing software that came with the computer on those huge floppies, and I would be 10 years old working on what I thought was the Great American Novel. The wonders of technology transferred my 5.25" blitherings onto the smaller, more recent floppies. But for the life of me I can't find a way to get the data off the small floppies because none of our computers have floppy drives anymore.

So I guess all this ramble is to say that computers have been a huge part of my life since I was very young, and me messing around on them far too much is not a new thing.

GEEK!