You have died of dysentery.

                          Module 8

            I remember my first experience with a personal computer, I had to have been three or four years old and living in San Diego. I was visiting my grandparents and I remember plugging in a true floppy disc and booting up Reader Rabbit from DOS and “.exe” was a phrase that I had become familiar with, of course Reader Rabbit was educational computer game that I had best known other than jumping on shit with my friend Mario.

To my memory we as a family did not have our own PC in our possession until after we had moved to Utah in 1994 and of course it was not until my father had started his own mortgage business that we had owned one finally. My dad bought a used Packard-Bell computer running Windows 3.1 when at the time everyone was running Windows 95 with Windows 98 soon on the horizon, and with the help of our first PC my dad started to manage his own business at home, he had no office other than the computer desk nestled in the corner of our living room and held files of his customers in a milk crate in the trunk of his car.  Whenever my dad was not on the computer, I had my chance to explore, and I eventually was the house computer genius, figured out how to open my own programs and play anything from paint to minesweeper to doom, I was a natural at being tech savvy. I remember my dad managing his accounts and calls from a computer call center that for the life of me I cannot remember the name of, but I do remember terrorizing my baby sitter with the use of such a brilliant program, and the ability to record active phone calls only to replay back to our parents after they made it home from their date night and for them to witness with their ears the heinous words from our very own 14-year old baby sitter. Yeah, my brother and I were little terrors, but it was one of the only times we had gotten along in uniting against a common enemy.

Other than the small home use it was not until my fourth grade year that I had an actual chance to use a computer in a classroom environment, and the first time I had to experience the internet to my memory. We did small research assignments creating some of our first reports and of course practiced typing with Mavis Beacon, but nevertheless I made my was back to the classroom where we had an Apple II and I had the chance to play Oregon Trail on it in my free time. Dysentery was something I had no knowledge about, but I had a feeling that at some point in my life that it would take me too, because on the Oregon Trail, everyone died of dysentery, and with that logic, I would die with the same disease in my life.

At home we did not have much money to afford the monthly fee of internet, or at least my dad was too cheap to pay for something that I could actually get for free with Juno, and deal with that horrendous ad bar that took up a good quarter of the screen. Juno, however, did introduce me to the power of e-mail. I do not think once in my life I experienced e-mail through AOL other than seeing such at a friend’s house, but learning the power of e-mail was pretty cool and something I used frequently to talk to family in California, but not much more than that.

High school and of course college has been the extent of my computer education use. Again mostly with writing papers, and doing research for homework, but I did get a little computer use in my theater tech classes throughout high school and little college which was pretty cool considering having the ability to sync sound boards with lighting effects and other special effects.

Now with college, especially with this class, I have never really understood the importance of this digital age, and realizing how intertwined it is now in my life. Its beginnings well before my life, how it influenced, and still influences my life, and still I will say how excited I am for the future of technology and really to think how much has changed in electronics and technology just in my life or even in the last five years. It is all new and exciting and even before this class I had never desired to set up this blog, but with my electronic quill and ink I am able to jot down my own thoughts for others to read or comment on or just have my own personal diary, I know that a blog may be old news but I really enjoy that, and now thanks to realizing the power of the cloud, I have this, some homework, you-tube, g+, and so on backed up in the vast internet network, and to find the end of it is just unfathomable. Thanks to computers, I did not die of dysentery, and my imagination is endless.