Girl and Computer: Reflecting on the journey that got me to where I am today

I got into computers when I was unequivocally a girl. It was 1982. I was five years old.

Back then, my dad made eyeglasses. My mom stayed at home with me and my year-old sister — which she’d continue to do until I was a teenager, when my brother finally entered kindergarten in 1990 or so. Their mortgage in 1982 was $79 ($219 in 2021 dollars), which was a good thing because my dad made about $13,000 a year.

We lived in Weedsport, New York, a small town in the middle of nowhere and about an hour’s drive north of Cornell University (a place, I’d later learn, that lots of people have heard of, fairly few of whom can point to it on a map).

We walked to the post office to get our mail. The farmers who lived just outside town were the rich people. In the winters the fire department filled a small depression behind the elementary school with water for a tiny skating rink. There were dish-to-pass suppers in the gym at church.

In 1982, Timex came out with the Timex Sinclair TS-1000, selling half a million of them in just six months. The computer, several times thicker than the original iPad but with about the same footprint if you set it on a table, sold for $99.95. When everyone else in town was getting cable, my parents decided that three channels were good enough for them (we still had a black-and-white TV) and bought the computer instead.

I remember tiny snippets of that time — playing kickball in my best friend Beth’s yard, getting in trouble for tricking my mother into giving us milk that we used to make mud pies, throwing sand in the face of my friend Nathan because I didn’t yet appreciate that it really sucks to get sand thrown in your face — but I vividly remember sitting in the living room of our house on Horton Street with my father, playing with the computer.

A cassette player nearly the size of a loaf of bread was our disk drive, and we had to set the volume just right in order to read anything off a cassette tape. There was some semblance of a flight simulator program that I’d play, after listening to the tape player screech for minutes on end. Eventually we upgraded the computer with a fist-sized brick of RAM that we plugged into the back of the computer, bumping our total capacity to something on the order of 34 kilobytes.

I wrote programs in BASIC, though for the life of me I can’t remember what any of them did. The programs that were the most fun, though, were the ones whose assembly I painstakingly transcribed, hunting and pecking with my tiny fingers, from the back of magazines — pages and pages of letters and numbers I didn’t understand on any level, and yet they made magic happen if I got every single one right.

When I was about 7, my dad lost his job. We moved to a town a couple of hours away, where he’d found another shop where he could keep making eyeglasses. We rented a duplex and I tried to make friends with the neighbor girls via my enthusiasm about the bugs in the back yard.

Coding with my uncle on the Coleco Adam, probably around 1985.

My parents bought a Coleco Adam. The computer came with a certificate redeemable for $500 upon my graduation from high school, but Coleco folded long before they could cash it in. We moved to a house, then another house. I made my first real money by typing a strange lady’s strange manuscript about strange food into an Apple IIe connected to the TV in the living room. My uncle and I spent almost the entirety of his visit from Oklahoma writing a game of Yahtzee!

In middle school, I started a school newspaper, and I think we used some very early version of Aldus PageMaker to lay it out on computers in the school library. When high school rolled around, I hand-crafted letters and lines and arrows in a technical drawing class just so I could take CAD classes and make the computer draw letters and lines and arrows for me. I quickly proceeded to out-CAD just about every boy in the class, a fact in which the teacher, Mr. Williams, clearly found some delight.

In the mornings I rode my bike around our neighborhood to deliver the newspaper. Every week, I’d go door-to-door collecting subscription fees, tearing off tiny paper tabs from each customer’s page in a special notebook, indicating that they’d paid.

In my senior year of high school, I oversaw the yearbook’s transition from laying out pages on paper to laying out pages with computers, this time the vaguely portable (it had a handle on the back!) Mac Classic. We used PageMaker again; the screen was black and white and 9", diagonally. We put black boxes where the pictures should go. The yearbook adviser sent me to detention because I decided to stop standing for the pledge of allegiance.

It was around then that my friend Marcus gave me a modem and — to his eventual chagrin, when he got the bill — access to his Delphi account, giving me my first taste of the whole Internet thing in the form of telnet, gopher, and IRC. When I went to college in 1993, I brought a computer with perhaps a 10 megabyte hard drive, and no mouse. I think it was a Tandy. Once again I found myself poring over magazines, now to discover URLs that I could enter to discover a whole new world of information.

In 1995, I spent the summer making my college newspaper’s web site, previewing it in Lynx. There wasn’t much to learn when there was so little difference between the markup and what I saw on the screen. I would go to the computer lab to use NCSA’s Mosaic browser on the powerful RISC 6000 workstations, because they had a mouse. I wandered the web using a new site called Yahoo!, which seemed like it might one day render those printed directories of URLs obsolete.

My friend Dave, who lived down the street from me, installed Windows 95 that summer and invited me over to get a glimpse.

It was amazing. We were living in the future.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3kTSLsv