Hey there, welcome to my Capstone Project blog! I’ve never done anything like this before, so I think what I’ll do is start from the beginning and talk about me and what got me started with computers.
The first exposure to computers that I can recall had to be Christmas of 1982, when my family got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I was extremely young and had absolutely no idea what magic was allowing me to shoot Asteroids and be E.T. on the TV screen, but I knew I never wanted to stop playing.
Santa delivered another leap into the future by leaving us a Nintendo Entertainment System under the tree in 1986. My mind was blown yet again, as this time Super Mario Brothers looked just like the game that I’d fed numerous quarters into at the arcade in the mall, way better than the Atari games looked. I basked in that 8-bit glory every day after school, but little did I know that the upcoming summer would provide the real eye-opening experience for me.
(Rob Boudon, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
One of my grandfathers was working for IBM during this period, and at the beginning of the summer he sent a series of mysterious packages. My father casually took them upstairs to his office without much fanfare. It wasn’t until a few days later that he asked my siblings and I if we’d like to see what Grandpa had sent us. We filed upstairs and when we walked into the room, we saw what looked like a big box with a TV on top of it and some other box with buttons in front of it, and another box with a big roll of paper in it.
“This is a computer!” he exclaimed excitedly. To say we were underwhelmed was an understatement. What sat before us was an IBM Personal Computer, the infamous Model 5150. He turned the monitor on and booted it up. All we saw was a screen full of words that really had no meaning to us. “It’s a typewriter that puts words on a TV instead of on a piece of paper?” I asked.
(Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F077948-0006 / Engelbert Reineke / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons)
“No,” he answered, “it can do some things besides that. Try this out.” He proceeded to start the game NINJA for me, and from that point onward I’ve been consciously hooked on computers. And here I am today a few months away from wrapping up a degree in Computer Science. What a journey.
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