Cyberspace

Yesterday I Googled Google. My computer exploded.

Computing is so advanced in today's world. I bought my first computer, Radio Shack's Color Computer, or Coco for short, after watching the movie, "War Games". I was hooked. I bought it the following day.

There was no internet, only programs. Al Gore was probably working on it, but it was a few years away. I subscribed to Radio Shack's monthly magazine, which always came with a new cassette, yes cassette, full of programs. It was very cool to own a computer in those days.

It was also the bane of my existence. There were only two ways to mess with the computer. You could plug in a game cartridge which, although primitive, was great fun, or load programs from a cassette player. Most of the programs were on cassette, so you would connect the player to the computer and load the program you want. Simple, right?

Wrong! It was the biggest pain in the behind. In order to load the program you wanted, you had to know EXACTLY where it was on the tape. Keeping in mind that the cassette players I used were nowhere near the quality of the machine that President Nixon used to erase the 18 minutes of damning Watergate recording. It was a plain old little cassette recorder/player.

If you tried to load a program and didn't start at the exact location required, it would load for a short time and then stop, with an "error 10" message on the screen. Even if you used the counter on the deck, it didn't help because it was inaccurate. So, you had to keep trying until you hit it right. I think I went through five cassette decks before the floppy disk came along. I learned that cassette players don't bounce gently off of walls.

When the Internet finally came, there was only one program, called Genie. My brothers and I thought it was amazing. It really was, for it's time. You would have to use a dial up modem, which worked sometimes, but was very loud and annoying. Using today's technology makes the older systems seem ridiculous, but it was the latest technology at the time, so it was pretty awesome.

I can hardly wait for one of the grandkids to complain to me about their slow connection. "Yeah? Well, in my day..."

See you tomorrow.

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