The earliest encounter I can recall having with any sort of operating system was thanks to the toiling of Mary Lou’s son with my second hand, handed down Commodore 64. I had already had a Nintendo for several years, but the Commodore 64 was very different from this. The Commodore 64 had a monitor, a keyboard, a modem, and a disk drive which were all separate components, and it also had joystick ports on the right side of the keyboard intended for gaming. Now, at the time I had acquired this device, I was eleven. My cousins had bestowed it upon me as they were likely at the point of necessary upgrading for their own gaming interests. In the floor the machine had sat for a couple of weeks until my mother’s friend Mary Lou had come to visit with her son who was thirteen years of age and intelligent about all things of interest. Really, he was studying the taxonomy of local area insects as he and his mother traveled about the nation. He already had read the field guide on identifying all the different bird species, and the ones on animals and fish also. Needless to say, he was very smart about the ways of things, and now he was to set out getting my Commodore 64 running for me. He and his mother spent a day or so reading through the manuals and trying different start codes, and eventually they had it figured out and running programs. The code was written down for me and the system was set up in front of me with a great variety of floppy disk games ranging from Frogger and Paper Boy, to California Games and The Caveman Olympics. I even had the smash em classic, Rampage. All I had to do was pop in the floppy disc and type in, “load”*”8, 1, and Enter” and I was off in young gamers’ fantasy land. Honestly, it was loads of fun and I hardly had to make any conscientious effort to set up the machine or figure out how to operate it since a friend had handed me the start up code.
Another early internet usage experience that I recall, struggling to figure out how to connect the SEGA Dreamcast to the internet. The SEGA Dreamcast was the first videogame console to have access to the internet. I bought one while they were still brand new. A toy that doubled as a tool to connect gamers to other gamers; it was genius. Alas, with connecting this system too I failed at setting up the internet connection and was doomed to playing Sonic without the internet mini-game bonuses. Eventually, one of my friends from that era of my youth figured the system out and managed to use his Dreamcast Web-browser CD to access the real internet through his TV and link to live play Unreal Tournament. An amazing feat to me at that time, but in retrospect, all of my peers from that age were already designing web pages, pirating software, and refining their protégé hacker skills. This same friend of mine that resolved the internet access dilemma via the Dreamcast also began burning CD’s full of ROM’s of old Nintendo games, or any type of games for that matter, to CD’s that could be played on the Dreamcast. I had him burn me one and I never figured out how to get my Dreamcast on the internet. [I’ve still got it if anyone knows how to get it to work...] Once again a wiser and more computer savvy peer resolved any queries I was having and streamlined the processes for me so that I could worry about gaming and not code, and such has been my experience with computers up until this day. Hopefully, I stand to learn lots more over the course of this class and will eventually become my own technical support guy.
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