1. Do you remember the first time you used a computer?
Yes, 1979, it was the fall of my junior year in high school. Our math teacher, Mr. Tonso had set up a series of networked IBM computers using BASIC and attached to a dot matrix printer with those all to familiar years later, 7″ floppy disks to save documents and manage the operating system. Pretty ahead of the times stuff and a great learning experience.
2. Do you remember the first time you used the internet?
It was in college after my time in the army, using an AOL startup disk and cruising along on the nascent web through AOL in 1988.
3. Do you remember the first time you used a word processor?
Yes, it was in the army, using the Wang word processor. (See the picture above to look at my Wang.)
4. Do you remember the first time you used a spreadsheet?
That would be at my first major job after college at the newspaper in Craig using Excel on a Macintosh to build out a chart for some dates and locations of hunting season stuff.
5. what is the next big thing in computers/telecom/technology?
They keep saying that laptops are going away, that phones are going away and the cloud providers like Amazon and Google are obsessed with voice search and “listening in on your needs” to offer their perceived solutions to issues. But I think the rubberband may bounce back to self rather then cloud and a return to owning data is a backlash I would like to see, but perhaps that genie is already out of the bottle. What’s nex? I think something like Google glass and/or a Star Trek like communicator that can read texts, send texts, mobilize social media and communicate with others. That is possibly closer than we think to becoming a reality.
1) 8th grade, 1977. The only computer at Carmody Junior High was in the science department and that was where you would find me, and in the darkroom. Simple basic language computer, not much could happen with it.
2) First time on “intra”net was at college talking amongst the campus computers. First time on the internet was mostly after college and AOL and dial up. I was the only one in our four-person rental that had it.
3) Hmmm, word processors came along the same time I started in with programming, so 8th or 9th grade.
4) No. I remember many hours lost into the void of spreadsheet manipulation, but not the initial dark road into hell.
5) Virtual display will become more common. Like the movie Minority Report. There will be more integration with everyday wearables and items we interact with all day long. Heads up display in our windshields, glasses with inset screens, more automated items, like cars and such. They exist right now, but are still very much in Beta. I strongly believe the pleasure orb will become common in every household (Sleeper, circa 1973).
1. I believe it was in seventh grade. One of my teachers had a Mac in his classroom which we were occasionally allowed to use. “One day they’ll have these in every home,” I remember him saying. To which I scoffed.
2. In the fall of 1994, two of the engineers I worked with showed me a Mosaic browser. That was a eureka moment for me–I immediately grasped the power that was about to be unleashed.
3. I had not used one until I got to college. During freshman orientation, there was a tutorial on MS-DOS, and then on WordPerfect. As it turned out, I would have to use both for the next several years.
4. I had to teach myself 1-2-3 for my first sales job. I was quite grateful for Excel when it came along with a WYSIWYG GUI.
5. More and smaller devices, IoT devices conspiring against us, and rush to AI which will dramatically change how we do most everything.