Tomorrow Today

My first computing experience was a teletype terminal in my elementary school in 4th grade. We would be pulled out of class one at a time to sit in front the TTY in a small room and answer math questions for five minutes. It was, if I remember correctly, connected to the district mainframe. That would have been about 1978.

A year later, the elementary school got a "real" computer lab, complete with two Apple computers and a strange little man with very thick spectacles whose name I have long since forgotten. But I remember there was a game called "Math Bomber" or something like that.

In 1983 my parents purchased a shiny new Apple IIe. At that time it was Apple's top-of-the-line home computer. I still have it in my attic, along with the purchase receipt for three thousand-something dollars (printer not included). It quite literally cost as much as a good used car and was a major investment for a family whose income was derived solely from two public school teachers. That was the machine that hooked my brother and I on computing, which was our parents' intent in making the investment. They were farsighted enough to know that computers were the future, and anyone who learned them as a child would have a leg up on the world. We learned to program in BASIC as well as play classic games like Starblazer, SubLogic Flight Simulator and Ultima on that machine. While I decided not to make a career of computers, my brother went on to become an IT professional. He currently works for the Houston Texans football team in that capacity.

The following years saw me move on to MSDOS-based machines. I hauled an IBM PS/2 Model 25 around the planet (literally) in a seabag. That thing was bulletproof. Typical IBM construction.

I've built a lot of machines since then, toyed with Linux, and even begun to come full circle as I've started tentatively adopting Apple products. And now here I am looking at a futurist illustration made in the 1970s which bears a striking resemblence to the 55" tv-cum-monitor on which I'm viewing it. A 55" monitor diplaying 8.2 million pixels in 68 billion colors! My 15-year old self would have been dumbfounded. Hell, my 52-year old self is still pretty awed by it. Sometimes futurists get it right. Of course, so do "psychics" and old blind hogs, so I don't get overly excited when they nail something. But the illustration is mildly amusing in this case.