It probably started when I was in fourth or fifth grade and my parents bought me a "junior typewriter" for Christmas. It only typed caps (the numbers were produced by shift and letter keys), but I thought it was wonderful. A couple of years later, the business college where my aunt and my mom worked decided to switch to all electric typewriters, and I bought an old Underwood manual from them for $50. My mom brought home a typing textbook, and I taught myself to type by working through it. I bought a Smith-Corona electric from them when they switched to IBM Selectrics a few years after that - which I kept through college and seminary.
Toward the end of my college years, I saw a prototype of a Texas Instruments computer that used a TV set as a monitor. I was fascinated, but it looked too complex - it didn't have any programs with it at all. While I was at seminary in the early '80s, there were some people buying PCs, and I became very interested when I heard the concept of a word processor. I was so busy and so broke working three jobs and going to school that I didn't really have the time or money to investigate, but I knew that someday I'd have to take a closer look.
When I started my second teaching career (after I finished seminary and decided that full-time church work was not the way I would be going), I discovered a wonderful little machine called the TRS-80. I would stay at school late and play - I mean work - at learning the joys of BASIC. At the end of the school year, my principal told me to take the computer home and really learn to use it. I spent hours that summer going through the tutorial book. The following school year, I kept the Trash 80 in my room at school and wrote a few simple programs and played a few simple games.
The next year, the school bought twelve Tandy 1000 SXs - they had color monitors and sound! I read scores of computer magazines over the next two years. I started doing everything I could on the computer - my lesson plans, my grade book - everything my principal would let me do. He put me in charge of the computer lab (I was the music teacher), and when I began to hear rumors of us getting a fully networked lab, I let it be known that I was interested in running it. I was moved to another school in the district to teach music, and at the end of the school year, my principal asked me if I wanted to teach exclusively in the computer lab. I jumped at the chance!
In the meantime, I had bought my first computer - an Austin 286-12 with all the bells and whistles available at the time - 1 Mb of RAM, a 40 Mb hard drive, a mouse, and a 2400 BPS modem. I also bought a Kawai K-1 synthesizer, a Voyetra MIDI card, and MIDI sequencing and notation software. It had MS-DOS 3.3, which was the current DOS at the time if you don't count v. 4 (and why would you?). I learned the ins and outs of DOS, learned to write batch files (some pretty intricate), and dabbled with QuickBasic.
The new lab had Tandy 2500-SXs, some with sound cards, CD-ROMs, and hard drives. They had Windows 3.0 and upgrade disks for 3.1. I upgraded them, and dove into the world of Windows. They also came with MS Works 2.0 pre-loaded. Every summer, I brought one of them home, and when the school bought a 486-66 with digital camera, scanner, and PowerPoint so I could learn to do multimedia authoring, I even brought those home over a summer.
At home, I kept plugging away on the old AT clone until my wife got tired of listening to me complain about it, and sent me out of the house one Sunday afternoon to go buy a new computer. I got an NEC P133 machine with 16 Mb of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive with all the bells and whistles, of course. I've since upgraded the memory to 80 Mb, and I'd like to get a Zip drive or a CD-RW and another hard drive and a scanner. As soon as I figure out which new MIDI software will best suit my needs, I'll get that, too.
I don't know what it is. The way the letters form themselves so perfectly on the monitor or on the paper. The way my thoughts seem to be made visible almost like magic. Or just the mystery of the machine itself. I had pretty well figured out the mechanics of the typewriter, and I was determined to find out how the computer knew to put q on the screen when I pressed Q. I learned just enough to satisfy my curiosity, and I'm leaving the rest of it to the real nerds to figure out. I'm just glad somebody did.