I bought Diane a Commodore 64 for Christmas one year in the early or mid 80s, can't remember exactly when. She used a word processor and a spreadsheet. I played games on it. Loved Crossbow! At first, we only had the tape drive. Slowwwwww loading. The graphics in the games were pretty good, though, on the color monitor. Then we got a floppy drive. So much better, faster. Then we got GEOS and some GEOS applications. It was so cool, looked like a Mac. We got a mouse. Different fonts, graphics, GEO-Publish. I read in the manual that you can make it do things by typing commands into a document in the format called BASIC. I tried it, and got a kick when it worked, which was just about every time I tried something. So, I got a book on BASIC from the community college library. I liked doing this. My brother-in-law gave us an IBM XT with a monochrome, amber, monitor. A friend almost immediately upgraded it for me to a Turbo XT, with more memory, a Hercules graphics card that had something like 720 lines or resolution. Graphics, though monochrome, looked great! He also gave me a 40Meg hard drive (it came with a 20Meg drive). Then he gave me a copy of MS BASIC compiler. Eventually, I wrote an accounting type program with it. At the time I had a photography business. I took a class at the community college, Introduction to Computers. I aced it, because I had already been introduced to the various concepts. I was helping my classmates with the homework. After about 6.5 years in the photography business, it started to fail. The economy had gone south and jobs started to dry up. I thought that maybe I could change carreers to computer programming. So, I enrolled in a computer programming course. I had graduated from high school in 1971. My study habits during junior and senior years were about non-existent. This was 1991. So, I only took two classes per semester. Aced them all. Then I took the Elements of College Math class. I only squeaked by in Algebra II in high school. And I made the mistake of taking the accellerated class, which met five days a week! By Thursday, I was so lost I went to my car and started to cry. I told the professor next day and he suggested that I withdraw from the class and get my money back and take a remedial Algebra class. I did. I did alright, but I didn't ace it. Got an 83. It brought my perfect 4.0 GPA down to a 3.95. But I aced the rest of the classes, including the math one. So got my AS with a 3.95. Then I did some contract work programming for the friend who upgraded my computer (he continued to do upgrades for a couple years). Also did contract work for someone else. Then I looked for a permanent job...didn't care for contract work, not knowing if I'd have income for weeks at a time, sometimes. Not a lot of experience, but an agency sent me to an interview. Then a few days later, sent me back to the same company. I was asking for a salary of $40K. The agent told me they didn't want to pay that much. After the second interview, I called as instructed, and he told me they agreed to $40K without any hesitation! This company was COMDEX, at the time the world's largest producer of IT trade shows! I was so happy, and it was the best job I ever had. I was working with FoxPro for DOS, and eventually Visual FoxPro for Windows.
Dana