dbgrandi

life influence

This week I'm supposed to be creating a scene that reflects a moment in my life involving one of my major influences. I chose my mom. As most of you know, I'm a pretty hard core computer geek. When I trace my computer literate influences it all goes back to my mom. She's always been quite computer literate (especially for a woman) and I thought the other day about the first computer she got for me.

Phase 1: The old Texas Instruments

I must have been no more than 3 years old when she got my this bad-ass Texas Instruments computer. It was basically a really thick keyboard with a coax hookup that went to the TV. On the side was a slot that would accept cartriges containing programs. (Oohh, found it in the Computer Museum.) This thing ran at a whopping 3 Mhz! I think I have a universal remote with more BogoMips than that thing now.

I can still remember playing 'Face Maker', my favorite game at the time. It was basically a digital version of Mr. Potato Head. Simple stuff, but it must have looked wierd for other people; coming over to the house and I'm (@ 3 years old) hacking away on this keyboard with a mug of coffee and a bag of Dorito's. ;)

Phase 2: The PS2

The next step up on the ladder of computation came in about 1986-87 when mom got an IBM PS2 Model 50. If I can remember correctly, 12 Mhz, 1 MB RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. The stuff dreams are made of, you know. She had this home business that she started; editing dissertations for foreign PhD students. I still have nightmares about our dot-matrix printer spitting out 80 pages at a time. The real fun came when it was time for the final copy of a dissertation. She would pay me to sit at the printer and hand feed the nice paper, one sheet at a time, into the dot-matrix.

The PS2 was the real beginning of my love of computing. Somehow or another, I found out about this thing that they called BASIC. I remember getting a subscription to a magazine devoted entirely to BASIC programming. This being way before the days of the Internet (at least for schmoes like me) the magazine would have 20 pages or so dedicated to including source code to whatever the featured program of the month was. Mom, being the nurturing type that she is, would sit down and help me type in 20 pages of BASIC code. We would take turns reading code off to each other; "Okay mom, '130 GOTO 10; 140 PRINT HELLO, WORLD!'", I would bark out. Any time there was a program that I was interested in, it would take about 2 days for us to get it punched into the computer correctly.

Looking back at that now, I realize that she was pretty hip to help her 7 year old son hack the Gibson.

Years went by, and slowly I noticed a shift from me asking her how to do something to her asking me how to do something. It was kind of awkward for me to slowly become the mentor of my mentor; like it was almost rude for me to watch her do something and say, "No, Mom, there's a better way to do that."

I still have that computer in my apartment somewhere. I haven't been able to bring myself to throw it away. As far as I know it still boots up and works. I even found a network card for it... a 10Base-2 card that uses the MCA bus. Somehow I feel like it needs to be around, a part of history that I can always look back upon to remeber my roots. At the same time, it's kind of scary to see the pace of change. It's hard for me to see how things have actually changed without having a solid reference to compare; kind of like how I couldn't tell when our dogs were growing, but other people who only saw them once a month could readily see how big they were getting.

Phase 3: the BBS scene

I'll leave this for tomorrow... the fun stuff.

Posted by dbgrandi at January 30, 2003 05:52 PM | TrackBack