There's good reason for the debate on when the "first" personal computer was released: some say the Programma computer created by an Italian company was the first. Others cite IBM's 1981 desktop personal computer. Regardless of when or where the personal computer was first conceived, it doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of my life. But I do take one claim to fame for my somewhat overlooked generation being born in the year of our Lord 1983: we might not have been the generation that invented the personal computer and we're not the first generation to have been blessed to have been born under the benevolent supervision of mainstream computing devices. But I am a part of the only generation in the entire timeline of human existence that can say we know what it was like to not have a computer, or VCR, or CD player, or--gasp! even cell phones--but can also say these electronic conveniences have grown up with us.
Growing up hand-in-hand with computing advances means we have an unusual, mostly positive perhaps a trifle of a love hate, relationship with these technological marvels. Most folks from my generation know how to use modern handheld devices nearly as well as the apparently whiz kids of the millennial generation, but we haven't forgotten our roots founded in the good 'ole MS-DOS prompt days when we were amazed at the 8 bit graphics of Vanna White moving pixel by pixel across the square 10 inch screen and the shrill music of the familiar theme song belting out of the mono-synthesized sound cards. We remember not only the 1.44 megabyte diskettes that were called floppy disks: we remember when floppy disks really WERE floppy, and huge, and susceptible to all manner of corruptions like breathing on them wrong or not flipping the hatch just right to secure the disk in the drive. We remember when desktop publishing was limited on most personal computers to the Paint program. Or, if you owned a really fancy system like my rich neighbors did when I was seven, you might have a coloring program that allowed you to fill in sections of an image with various colors and print pictures out in grayscale using the bubble-sheet printers where you still had to tear off the sides and individual sheets of paper.
But our experience has been different since we grew up realizing the power of personal computers rather than viewing them as a necessary evil or annoyance for the Baby Boomers or a thing that is bread into the DNA and learned by some kind of fantastical osmosis for the millennials. No, in elementary school, there was such a thing as a computer lab since individual classrooms didn't warrant having their own. Computers had black screens and jagged green fonts and we used them as a special treat once a week to enhance our math concepts or to practice our typing skills. But we persevered through various versions of Macintosh or IBM computers long before people really knew the brand Mac or before people had forgotten about IBM. And we worked our way through the 386 processors, were amazed when we started to use the term "Megabyte" as a unit of measuring computer memory (to prove this amazement: I remember for my 11th birthday my family gave me Sim City 2000, which required 8 megabytes of RAM. My parents bought me 16 additional megabytes of RAM to go with the preloaded 4 Megabytes the factory setup provided. I thought that much space was practically limitless).
We went through the various renditions of storage devices from floppy disks, to diskettes, to the remarkable advancement, that lasted about three years, of zip drives. I remember when my family installed its first CD-ROM drive. It was a revelation for me. The concept of putting music and video content on something that could be read by lasers seemed science fiction to me until I started burning my own discs (with the term "burning" being a buzz word in Middle School I was able to be cool enough to say and which meant I got inundated with requests from friends asking me to burn multiple copies of their DOOM game discs.). The first year of high school, I was checking out at Office Max, yes this was back when people still shopped for school supplies at office supply stores, when I saw these small, funny looking things called "USB drives." It held a 16 Megabyte capacity and most computers didn't come equipped with USB ports. I bought one because they were having a special: $10 price for the drives when you purchase $25 worth of school supplies. I recently purchased a thumb drive (you don't hear people calling them USB drives anymore) with a 128 Gigabyte capacity. The difference in size isn't just laughable; it's essentially like saying a lot and nothing. 16 mb is 0.000125% of 128 gb.
I used the first IBM and Compaq laptops, made a few calls on the first mainstream cell phones which were about the dimensions and weight of bricks with antennas you had to pull out. I felt so sophisticated when I could be seen using my Palm Pilot's stylus, having learned the stylus language for those devices that were strictly for planning and scheduling. I used PageMaker before InDesign took its place in high school, and still used real books for my first real research paper in college, having gathered a stack of 20 books that I spent days exploring to find a few sentences to use as references.
I bought my first iPhone when Razr phones were all the rage and when iPhones even with an exclusive contract with AT&T cost $800, but was worth the cost since it took three years for my phone to not be cool anymore. And I recently purchased my fourth version of iPhone, the iPhone 6 plus along with the line-up of iPad, iPod, iMac, AppleTV, and Macbook Pro.
And social media certainly is no mystery to us either, but we remember before Facebook, or before Googling was a thing, or back when Netscape was the known quantity when it came to web browsers, and when internet speeds were measured in kbytes/sec not mbytes/sec or gbytes/sec. The sound of a dial-up modem gives me a surprisingly warm feeling of nostalgia though I keenly remember how painful it was to open up AOL or CompuServe. I opened my Facebook account in 2006, less than a year after Facebook opened it's doors to the masses, in a time when you could do little more than decide which among two unfortunate souls was hotter and giving clip art presents to friends on birthdays.
I watched Napster be shut down, iTunes rise to prominence, MySpace rise and fall and followed eagerly the choice of Yahoo to purchase MySpace and Google YouTube. And I was old enough to realize what a clear gamble it was for Google to decide on YouTube since back them online video streaming was not in the public vernacular.
So, perhaps our preceding generations may have the corner on knowing what living off the grid means and perhaps the generations following ours might have a bit more of an intuitive sense about cutting edge technologies. But I'm a part of the only generation that will ever be able to say that we know what it was like before the technology, welcomed it when it came, and stayed up with it when it started advancing at cyclone speed. I'll leave it to the sociologists to determine what characteristics this might mean for my generation, but it gives me a bit of much needed pride to the generation that might as well be called "one of the ones that happened after the Baby Boomers and before the Millennials." And I still have that first USB Drive. I don't use it anymore, obviously because almost no current files are small enough to fit on a 16 mb drive. But I hold on to it nonetheless to help me remember my roots: before these crowded WiFi hotspots.
