34. My first foray in to computers was on my uncle’s colecovision computer console when I was about 10. It was best described in South Park as the poor man’s atari athough I personally think it had much better graphics. My favourite game was the smurfs (oo naked smurfette), but I enjoyed Venture for it’s forbidden nature. You see, my uncle wouldn’t let my cousin and I play it because it was scary. So of course, when he wasn’t around we’d fish it out and play it. Why was it scary? It had goblins and snakes and arrows and scary music. If you stayed too long in the room the music would get faster and faster and then the baddy would come and eat you!!! Geez we’d scream when that happened.
33. My next exposure was to an epson pc, otherwise known as the x-files computer due to it’s tinge of green on the monitor. This is where I typed my high school assignments and printed them out on the dot matrix computer and played california games. My favourite in the games was the surfing level, because sometimes a shark would come and eat you. My family had aquired the computer when one of my Dad’s businesses went bust.
32. In grade 9 my high school taught computer studies for one semester. I’d spent grade 8 learning typing, killing time until I was in the right stream to do the computer class. I’d put up with typing a-s-f-d to the tune of “eye of the tiger” and “another one bites the dust” in the theory that i could use my formidable typing skills in the computer course. Instead I spent most of the time drawing flow charts and saving 01 GO on to my rather large floppy. At least the teacher fulfilled the stereotype of the nerd with his glasses and lab coat.
31. Once I left high school I didn’t touch another pc for 4 years. This meant I missed the whole windows 3.1 revelations. The return to computers came about from a visit to my friends dorm room at Griffith Uni. Her boyfriend had networked her pc to the pc next door and he showed off it’s capabilities by playing a 3 second clip of the simpsons. It was in colour, it moved, and to me it was amazing!!! On that same fateful visit I was shown the mystical “internet” in the student labs and I was hooked. This was around 1994, I was working in my dream job at Royal Copenhagen Ice Cream but was getting bored, so I enrolled in an associate diploma in computing at Tafe and moved back home to study.
30. Tafe. I was with 20 nerds, 4 girls who missed out on their photography/hairdressing courses and one cool mac chick. I couldn’t use a mouse so I honed my skills on solitaire. I had to use my Dos for dummies book in the exams (it was allowed) and had no understanding of algorithms. With help from the cool mac chick (AKA Pauline) and my new pc that I purchased I became a computing machine. I’d stay up late surfing the net, install a bunch of crap programs on the pc, break it, format it and start it all again. My learning curve was steep but eventually I began to get all the nerd jokes (10MB ha ha) and started doing well in the exams. This eventually led me to my ever so respectable job as a Desktop Support Technican which led to my current role as a “web developer”. Who’d have thought it would start with a coleco??