A Lifetime of Computing
Home computers have been a huge part of my life almost since their invention. As a kid, my brother got a computer for passing grade seven and I almost totally took it over. It was only fair; my brother got a computer for being a bad student and I had stellar grades all my young life. The computer was a TRS-80, often called the Trash-80 by those who were lucky enough to get the mother of all home computers, an Apple IIe. The TRS-80 we had didn't come with a disk drive and we had a hard time hooking up a cassette recorder to it. Still, I loved the games we got on cartridges, and I personally went through the whole manual until I could modify and re-invent the programs that were printed in it. I remember being so proud I could modify a "make paintbrushes out of joysticks" program so you could change colors and even erase mistakes, something the program in the manual couldn't do.
One day after school I don't know what got into me, but I didn't want to do anything but play video games. So I set the computer up so I could lay down on the couch and restart the Asteroids clone with my feet, and I played over and over all night only getting up to eat. My dad was livid that I would waste my life away doing this.
Eventually the TRS-80 became boring, but it took a few years. I moved out at 18 and tried and failed several times to buy a i386 with financing. Those computers seemed so incredibly cool, even though I had little idea on how to run one. At that age, I sat in on a couple of computer classes and in just two hours learned enough to open a new world of computing fun. The concept of having an A: drive and a C: drive was to me revolutionary.
At 20, I finally had my own apartment and, barely scraping by as a bag boy in a grocery store, specifically went out and got a second job to save up to buy an Apple IIe I had found in a pawn shop. This really began a lifetime love of all things digital.
A friend managed to get me some joysticks and a bunch of disks with games on them. I didn't realize how illegal it was, but all the 100 or so disks he gave me had hacked software on them. I was in heaven, being able to type out and save diary entries, and play computer games that were far advanced from anything I had seen. There were so many Apple computers that no one used anymore that I was able to keep on getting new parts and disks. The only thing I didn't have was a modem, but I had been told that not many people in 1992 had anything set up for 300 baud modems.
After a couple of years of puttering with my Apple IIe, I took out an ad explaining I was a starving student and wanted a PC. It was out of date, but for $100 I was able to purchase an i8086. It was incredible. It didn't just have a disk drive; it had a hard drive, and it came with a printer. One of my lifelong dreams was to become a writer, and this computer allowed me to start to write out and edit my stories, most of them true stories of my life, in digital format, and print them up. I still have the old dot-matrix printouts from the first draft of my memoir, which years later after much effort became a real book and sold over 500 copies despite being self-published.
The i8086 had no modem, but I had a friend with a Mac that did, and he showed me how to log into BBS sites. I was so amazed whenever I made a connection with another computer, but totally floored once when I logged into a BBS and the sysop started chatting with me. To me it was as though the computer had suddenly become sentient. The sysop and I became good friends. I went over to his place once and he had a full wall of TVs, a computer for his BBS, and another for fooling around. When he shut down the "fooling around" computer, a voice just like the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey would declare, "I know you are trying to shut me down, but I can't allow that." It was such a trip.
I kept that i8086 for a long time, until another friend brought me a i286 his mom wanted to get rid of. For hours we sat happily hacking away as he loaded all kinds of software on it and showed me all kinds of new things. I was so amazed at how easy it all came to me that I went right out and bought a secondhand i386 with math coprocessor. I spent so much time with that computer over the next months that I started to develop a back problem from lack of exercise.
One day, I got an unexpected windfall. I received a $6,000 check and the very first thing I did was to go out and buy a Pentium computer with a 333 MHz clock. Now I could do just about anything a computer can now, just slower, but way faster than my i8086. What I loved the most was connecting with new people in chats, but I also got serious about chess and flight simulators. I used to get such a thrill from flying a Cessna in Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 and navigating around the simple worlds, then coming in for a landing. Later, as I explored other software, I experienced the thrill of Air Combat in many forms. Sadly, I was starting to lose touch with reality as I wasn't working or going to school. All my life I had suffered from a mental illness, but it had been well controlled by medications. Now, a long time had passed since I had seen my doctor and I wrongly started to believe that I no longer had an illness and stopped taking medications. This period was followed by a breakdown and hospital stay that was devastating.
The funniest thing about this hospital stay was that my love of computers helped end it. As I started to show improvement, I was given privileges to go to the computer room in the hospital and I typed out and printed up a list of problems I was experiencing and the things I wanted changed about my treatment. I gave it to my doctor, and he was so amazed that I was functional enough to operate a printer and computer when they had thought I was some kind of mental midget that soon after I was released.
My next big upgrade in computers came while I was living in a group home after being released from the hospital. It was a Dell computer my dad had helped me finance. It had some groundbreaking multi-user online games and I lost myself in them, though thankfully as I was under supervision in the group home, I continued to take treatment and medications. I got myself a job as a security guard and saved up for a laptop so I could play Call of Duty and other games at work.
Eventually, I moved out of the group home and had a well-paying job that only kept me working two to three days a week. I loved computers so much that I started what I can only describe as a nonprofit computer store in my new apartment. At any given time, I had dozens of computers in my home, I would swap around hard drives, install Linux, and play flight simulators on the wall of my kitchen with a projector. It was sheer joy. I remember learning that when I got stuck on a problem of loading software or changing chips that if I just sat down, had a coffee, and took a break, the solution would come to me out of the heavens. Now and then I would sell a computer for what I paid for it, and then would use the money for more equipment.
Eventually, I rekindled my love of Apple products. I didn't have a great deal of money, but I took some money out of a retirement account and bought a new MacBook Air. It was one of the best computers I had ever owned. It was so easy to use and never succumbed to a virus or seemed to slow down with time as many of my PCs seemed to do. Plus, I was starting to do a lot more writing at the time, and it ran Microsoft Word for Mac, the industry standard, beautifully.
All that brings me almost to modern day and my wonderful, subsidized apartment. When I first moved in, I bought a used MacBook Pro, and it was all I needed. It had a DVD player, and I would often work on my stories, then near the end of the day I would pop in a DVD of the original The Twilight Zone with the lights dimmed and just drink in the fascinating stories penned by incredible minds that made that show one of the greatest ever. One night I watched an episode with William Shatner in it, and the very next day a friend invited me to the Edmonton Expo and, for the small fee of $85, I got to meet William Shatner and get his autograph. Our conversation, which started because the photo I had purchased had a sticky note with my name on it, went like this:
"Hi Leif!" I couldn't believe the captain of the Enterprise had said my name.
"Hi Mr. Shatner. I saw you on The Twilight Zone last night."
"They're still running that thing?"
"Yeah, and you looked about 20 years old in it." (Shatner at the time was pushing 90.)
"I was about 20 years old."
"Well, you still look great." End of conversation, beginning of lifetime of happy memory.
Now, I do most of my work on a 2022 MacBook Air. I love everything about it, though I have a PC notebook and an older MacBook Pro just in case. I do a lot of journalism, and without a computer it would be impossible; my MacBook and my Samsung phone have become almost an extension of my body. I can do research, write, edit, print, modify, save, and re-send, not to mention connect with coworkers and clients over Zoom. It is a dream come true for any writer. The only problem is, so many other people can do the exact same. Payment rates for writing have gone down steadily over the years. And so, adding my love of learning, which is helped in no small way by keeping up to date on things through 2600 Magazine, at 51 I am signed up to return to school to learn computer programming next month. I had been reluctant to return to school at my age, partially because I won't have much time left until retirement, and partially because at 51, my memory isn't what it used to be. But I have decided that I must follow my passions and all my life since I first got that cartridge-slot TRS-80, I have known computers are, as Captain Kirk said, "My best destiny."