Bloganuary is over… Long live Bloganuary.

WordPress still has these daily writing prompts. Will I participate every day? Probably not. But when I think about… When I feel like it… Why not?

Now… In regards to the first computer my family ever owned, I’ll see what I can recall. It was, after all, many years ago. I don’t even remember how old I was. If I’m right, it would have been Christmas of 1992. Because 1992 is the year Wayne’s World came out. That clue is important… stay with me.

That computer was a gift from my uncle on Mom’s side. To say it was a hand-me-down sounds like it wasn’t appreciated. Quite the opposite. This was a desktop computer that my uncle and his family had been using for some time. And the gift-wrapped box that it came in was labeled with mine and my sister’s names. Together, we tore into it and saw the parts of the computer inside. In a second box was the old school monochrome monitor that probably weighed 185 pounds.

When my sister and I realized what was being gifted to us, we dropped in front of my uncle and his wife and, emulating Wayne and Garth in that classic film, began bowing down and shouting, “We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy!” That’s why I’m pretty sure it was 1992.

Anyway, we got that sucker back home, hooked it all up, and super enjoyed our first home computer experience. For us, this was pre Windows… We were strictly and MS-DOS family. And at first, I’m pretty sure we did everything by typing into the command prompt. Thankfully, an uncle on Dad’s side provided us with the software for… I want to call it QuickMenu? That ring a bell for anyone? Anyway, once we had that, it was point and click, a lot like the old school Windows 3.1.

I’m fairly certain we had a Chuck Yeager endorsed flight simulator that came as part of the hand-me-down package, along with Print Shop Deluxe and (maybe) Chessmaster… And in the early days of the internet, we had dial-up access with Prodigy. This was our first exposure to email and online gaming with a Prodigy version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and, my personal favorite, an old school RPG type game called Mad Maze.

But you know how those old dial-up modems work… Someone picks up the phone while you’re online? You get kicked off. Someone tries calling your house while you’re online? You get kicked off. Someone accidentally breathes the wrong way or the planets are moving in just the wrong positions? You get kicked off.

Oh, and remember how I said we had Print Shop? While it was a lot of fun just play around and create flyers and banners and birthday cards that you had to fold yourself, the question must be asked… How did we print our amazingly advanced graphic designs? With a state of the art IBM dot matrix printer! You know, the kind with all the paper that just stayed in the box and was fed through the bottom of the printer and scrolled up with those perforated edges that you had to tear off whenever you printed anything. I can still hear that thing practically burning the words and images into the paper…

So that was our first computer. I’m sure I’m leaving something out… Oh! How it died! That’s a great story…

We were out one day and a storm hit while we were gone. When we came home, we noticed the clocks were blinking, meaning the power had gone out at some point. When we tried to boot up the computer, it wouldn’t do anything… So we took the casing off of the CPU and discovered that whatever knocked out the power must have fried our computer. And I mean that literally… there were scorch marks on the motherboard.

After that we saved up and got something a little more 1993ish… With a full color monitor! And AOL!

Feature Photo by MART PRODUCTION