My Computer History

In 1981, my computer programmer husband brought home an Apple II+ CPU for which he had paid $1000. At the time I was too stupid to be excited. He thought he would program some games on it. There was no monitor and no disk drives were available.

In 1984, I did some freelance paste-up work for a local printer named Jerry and I noticed that he had a very similar computer in his shop. By now we had a floppy disk drive and began looking at software. Jerry showed me a bright yellow software package and showed me what it did. You start the program, click on all your choices and viola. You have a greeting card, a poster, or even a banner. OMG I needed that.

What I didn’t know was what was inside the box and that it would change my life forever. I knew about the samples of colored papers which were way cool, but down at the bottom of that box was a blue greeting card, already folded, which was strange because no dot matrix printer would be able to do anything without the paper being flat or having the perforated dot matrix edging that moved the paper along. I read the card and it said in bold letters, “Send us your graphics.” As an artist, designer, and art instructor, I thought that was about the coolest thing ever. Inside the card explained that on the program disk was a graphic editor utility. I didn’t bother to make many banners, cards, or posters because I was always using the graphic editor.

Sadly, both the iMac and the iBook died a slow and painful death when they became infected by a worm from an unprotected PC file I had brought home from school. I was able to save most of my files before their demise.

I'm not sure what will come next or when.

Since the last hardware fix, I have had to set

my computer back to factory standards at least

4 times. The last time was a few months ago now

and it seems to be fine, although I believe I shall start

to feel out of place amidst a sea of iPads.

This was Starfleet Academy My lab at Holy Family School.

This is the Mac PowerPC. It was fast and powerful and I got one of only 6 delivered to Milwaukee stores that year for home. Oddly, it was purchased from Sears.

I was very lucky to be honored at an Apple

banquet one night during a teacher's convention.

This was the same day I first saw an iMac up close

and personal. I didn't want one of the colors so I

purchased the "Snow" model and I loved it. By now I

had internet in my single girl bachelor apartment.

Although I still only had an AppleIIe at home

I had no trouble getting used to the AppleIIGS.

It was colorful and programs like Hyperstudio

were better than Hypercard for multimedia work.

I did a lot of presenting at state conferences and had

Hyperstudio creator Roger Wagner come to one of my

sessions and tell me he loved what my kids were doing.

In 1990 I got a job teaching computer classes at Holy Family Catholic School in Whitefish Bay, WI. They had just purchased 3 more Apple IIGS computers to make a total of 9 GS’s on nice carts in the computer lab. There were also some odds and ends like an Apple IIC, and an Apple III that had been donated from the Milwaukee Bucks office.

This was essentially my first laptop. I was able to

purchase this Mac Powerbook and it went home

with me so I could create teaching materials.

Less than 3 months later I purchased this iBook so I could take notes in my night classes. There was no wireless at the University of Milwaukee campus, so there were not all the distractions available today.

These were all in one Macs and one year

I got at least a dozen of them. We still did

not have a network or anything more than one internet line in the computer lab.

The AppleIII had a built in disk drive

but also had Lotus 123 built in. I worked

with Appleworks so it was familiar looking. We only had one so I mostly had one student assigned to it as a place he could try out stuff he learned in computer camp.

This 17" screen was a desktop replacement

HP Pavilion. I had it less than 6 months when some crackheads came parading through my house while I was at work stealing everything I owned that was electronic and flat. This computer was

accompanied by a scanner and two different types of DVD players/converters.

Double click anywhere & add an idea

I saw this computer in an ad which said Diva, and I

knew it was for me. I was not happy that I could not

get it with XP, but perhaps the Vista OS was not

really that bad. I got it to replace my stolen HP, but

also so I could have a machine I could use for Second Life.

I had just discovered virtual worlds and my old Dell was not

a great graphic machine. Unfortunately, every time I tried to

build my screen went black. About a gazillion hours on the

phone to "Timmy" who had a thick accent virtually impossible

to understand and two LCD panels, one hard drive, and one motherboard later it finally worked. As I had tried to convey, it was the graphic card but no one would listen.

One day I was told that my Mac lab at school was going to be replaced with a PC lab. Apparently I was not going to be training kids to go to high school, I was training them all to go into business. I was not happy about this change especially since I would no longer have the software I had come to rely on for primary classes. They were lucky I could make it work. In order to create teaching materials, now I would need a PC at home. This Dell was my first "lemon."

The $50 per graphic I received from Broderbund was not all that much, but it did pay for our next computer which was a platinum Apple IIe. For those of you who care, it had the 80 column card, numeric keypad, and for Valentine’s Day I got my first mouse. It was a great gift but also very telling regarding the lack of romance in my marriage. It was a great computer and we had the new Apple Imagewriter printer.

The AppleIIc was a cutesy little

computer. One version had a flat panel

LCD monitor and another had a little "baby"

monitor which was sort of an 8" cube. The one

with the LCD panel folded flat and had a handle

for carrying. I thought of this as the first laptop

especially because it had a built in disk drive.

He really didn’t get much of a chance to use it after that…

One of these little puppies went with me

to a Transcesent seminar one year. No one

else at the seminar had a computer along

with them so our group felt pretty "cutting edge."

He hooked it up to an old color TV and a cassette recorder and because I was not being very kind about him paying $1000 for this “thing,” he showed me how to program in lo-res graphics.

Drawing was done using the I, J, K, and M keys as directionals. You held down the D for draw and E for erase and it was very much like your hands became the dials on an Etch a Sketch. The graphics were simple because there just weren’t that many pixels, but I sent a disk with my newly designed graphics to David Balsam at Broderbund and was surprised when he called me a couple of weeks later to say they were going to use some of my designs on their new graphic disks. I was now a digital artist

I loved going into CompUSA and seeing my name

on the back of the packages or on the insert. Another

cool thing was booting up the disk from the backside

and seeing my name and graphics as part of the "Easter egg"

display most people didn't know about.