Missing the Boat: My Early Memories of Computer Technology

I've just been reading the book “I Woz” by Steve Wozniak (listening to the audio version, actually), and I found myself getting just a bit dismayed that I hadn't paid attention to computer technology as closely as I could have when I was younger. Then I remembered that I had actually paid some attention. So I thought I'd write down my thoughts about it.

I've always been on the trailing edge of technology. When I saw the first IBM PC with a program called (I think) “Le Menu” I wondered why anyone would ever want to use that. When I heard about blogging, I thought it was a strange and useless concept. When I heard one of my co-workers a few years ago say that he thought it would be great to have a Palm Pilot and a cell phone in the same device, I thought he was a bit crazy. When I heard about Facebook, I thought it could be nothing other than a monumental waste of time.

Ironically, I am now a computer programmer, an avid blogger, and an even more voracious user of Facebook, and the one device I cannot do with out is my smartphone.

When I was approaching high school age (and when at least gigantic “mainframe” computers were coming of age, I remember walking with my father from the silage pits on our farm up the road to the feedlot. I told him that I wanted to take over his part of the operation someday, and he matter-of-factly told me, “No, you'll probably go into working with computers.” I was 14, and there were mainframes and a handful of other almost unknown computers around, yet he had the insight to know what my future would be.

When I was about 11, my cousin got the game Pong. We played it on his TV. I remember thinking that it was pretty cool, but it didn't hold my attention, let alone make me inquisitive about how it worked. I had the same boredom vis-a-vis video games, such as Asteroids and Pac-Man, which my high school buddies spent hours and hours and quarters and quarters playing. They got so good that they could make a quarter-dollar last a half hour before all of their spaceships were destroyed or their Pac-Man was eaten up enough times by ghosts. (I still don't have much patience for video games.)

I had always been an afficionado for great stereophonic sound, probably because my dad had a great reel-to-reel stereo system with amplifier in the home where I grew up—with a speaker in almost every room. My favorite birthday present was a record player, and my mom bought me 5 new 45 RPM records at Skaggs to play on them. Later on, for a Junior High graduation present, she bought me a nice stereo, with the first of its kind 8-track recording deck. I remember listening to Kasey Kasem's top 40 with my 8-track recorder queued to tap off my favorite songs for later playing enjoyment. In high school, I purchased a white 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and I spent hundreds of dollars for a nice tape deck, graphic equalizer, amplifier, speakers, and time-delay system (which made my car sound like a large concert hall). My dad wondered why I spent so much money on worthless stuff, but he didn't put up too much of a stink, because he loved good sound, too.

I bought most of my stereo equipment, in St. George, Utah, at a place called Arrow Audio, which is where I had seen an Atari gaming machine that ran a program called Space Invaders or something like that. It held my attention for a few minutes. I remembered wondering how cool it was that someone could make random space objects (mostly stars) appear and whoosh by on the computer screen, but it didn't impress me enough to have the patience to figure out how to program it.

It wasn't until after I returned from my LDS mission to Austria in 1984 that I developed a passion for computers, though. My mother had even had an Apple I computer before that, but, like my initial reaction to video games smartphones, blogs, Facebook, and the IBM PC later, I wondered, what would I ever do with that?

It was an Intro to Computers class where I first fell in love—not with girls (that had already happened a few times)--but with computers. I knew that I had to go out and by myself one. My computer teacher at Dixie had an IBM PC with 640 kilobytes of memory, a floppy drive, and a 10 megabyte Bernoulli drive, which I almost worshiped. He told me one day, looking at his computer system “I can't imagine ever needing anything more!” Little did either of us know...

...to be continued...