My First Computer Experinces

I can’t really remember too well anything from my early childhood, especially enough to give details about. So the best I can do is give a basic time line of what I can remember. Also please excuse any facts that I might have out of order, I can’t really put any dates on anything except for when they relate to school.
I believe the first real memory I have of playing or using a computer was probably when I was between the ages of probably six to eight. Now remember I can’t remember exact dates so this memory and the next could actually have been backward in real life. But as I remember it, it was that my parents bought a home computer , it was that it was big and clunky and had a color screen. They were proud of that color screen. The only thing I remember about the computer was that my dad and I used to play a flight simulator game called Pacific Strike. We had a joystick and everything for it. But the thing I remember most was that to play it you had to exit out of the windows system and bring up DOS and run a command prompt to start the game. When it started it ran a little run screen that looked a lot like late ‘80’s run screens that were all one color and had the words that were highlighted in a chunky fashion and you had to scroll up or down with the key board to select a command instead of buttons. Other than that about all I remember is that you could never really see your enemy target to well because of the lack of colors the screen had.
The next thing I remember was when I was probably eight or nine, and was playing Oregon Trail. I would have never remembered playing this if you hadn’t of mentioned it in class. But I was probably in third or forth grade and we had it in our class room. The only thing I really remember was that it was a black and orange screen and that I always ended up killing my party. I remember that you could choose to either ford the river for free or for a certain cost you could either hire a ferry or build a raft and float your caravan across. I was always the thrill seeker when I was little so I would always try and ford the river unless it was obvious that it was way too deep. That’s about all I remember of it.
After that my dad probably spent all of his life savings on a digital light board for his concert production company. Now he wasn’t the first in his field but he was one of the first of the very small companies to do it. We had to of spent a good couple of weeks trying to figure that thing out. I remember it came with a book to run it that rivals most textbooks on thickness. But he and I through trial and error managed to somehow get that big old clunky thing working. Now I look back and think of how much things have changed over the last ten years. When he was designing a stage for a client we used to build scale replicas of the actual stage out of either foam board or just wooden dowels and it took a good two days to build just that, then he would have to bring the client into his office and show them. Compared to today where my dad builds the whole show on a 3D drawing program with the scale stage and the light show already timed and put into place. He just burns it onto a CD and sends it to his client across the world and when they load it they can walk in using their mouse to their potential stage and look at it from every angle. We used to also have to run a lot of the gobos and lights by hand on a light board using two or three people not including any of the sound guys. Now my dad can run everything without any help on his own using computerized already programmed lights and sound.
The last big computing event I remember that has any significance was back in either late ‘96 or ‘97 and that was when my family got our first AOL account. My dad still to this day uses the same freaking account. I started up my own under his and started learning how to talk in a chat room. I remember a commercial for something they showed a kid talking to another kid in a chat room and it was the first time I ever saw one. And for some reason I got the impression that you could see exactly what the other person was typing as they typed it on your screen and I thought that it was so cool. I thought that was how chats worked up until this point when I joined my first chat room and to much dismay you could only see a line after they typed it and press enter. But all the same it was my first experience on the web. Now I never really went online for anything else, mostly because there really wasn’t much else on the web. I don’t think I really started using the internet until probably late, late ‘90 early ‘00 as a way to look anything up.