I grew up in Redmond, WA, before it was the land of
Microsoft, with a father who is an accountant by profession
but a techie at heart. The first computer we had was "mini
computer" the size of a refrigerator. It produced
enough heat to warm our house through mild Northwest winters.
In the early 1980s, amidst the Atari craze, my sister and I
got a TI-99/4A (that's from Texas
Instruments) and spent an untold number of hours working to
master Parsec, Hunt the Wumpus, and Tunnels of Doom. The
movie War Games, with a teenage
(pre-Ferris Bueller) Matthew Broderick trying to prevent a
crazed computer from launching nuclear weapons, was one of my
favorites around this time.
By the time I started high school, my family had a personal computer that looked recognizably
like a desktop and on which I wrote school papers before
there was such a thing as a computer mouse or widespread
Internet access. When I left for college in 1994, I got my
first laptop and was the only person I knew who had their own
computer. It wasn't until my second year of college that I
got an email account, which I used only to write to others at
the school. But then in 1998, after returning from a term
studying abroad, I began using email daily to stay in touch
with new friends from far-flung places.
In my first jobs after college, I found that the computer training that had
been a natural part of growing up with my father made it easy
for me to learn new programs and expand my skills (and worth
as an employee). But alas, the corporate world didn't hold my
attention and I returned to graduate school to write day and
night in Microsoft Word and play with graphic and web work as
a diversion. Over the past year or so, I've weaned myself
from Dreamweaver and taken to writing (X)HTML and CSS by
hand.
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