First experience

I have a few formative experiences with computers, almost all of which have to do with gaming. I remember having a computer in my home pretty early on in my life, probably around 1991 at the latest. It was in my parent's room, where I would sit and watch my mom typing at furious speeds, working on papers and sermons for her Seminary classes. When we eventually got the Internet (I remember our service provider was Prodigy), I played some sort of game based on the old kids' series The Babysitter's Club. I wish I could find a picture or a link for it now, but my memory of it is so poor that I wouldn't even know where to begin searching for it.

Another memory comes from when I would visit my Dad at work. I would play games on his work computer. The first game I remember on his computer was called "Beast".

Believe it or not, this picture shows an even more sophisticated version than I remember my dad playing. My Dad's version was orange and black and consisted only of letters (I think the green areas were X's). I don't much remember the point or goal of this game, but I enjoyed watching my Dad play it instead of doing his work. I also played some card games on his computer. I believe these were some sort of gambling games, but the main thing I remember is that they were very colorful and with very poor graphics.

Then, of course, there's the memory that so many of my generation has.

It's the good old 8-bit, DOS-based Oregon Trail, of course! Just looking at this picture makes me teary-eyed and nostalgic. The original 8-bit is the best of all the versions, by far. I remember having to learn the commands in DOS to start the game. I wish I could find it and play it again. The only versions I can find now are the well-animated versions, which simply do not compare. I used to go over to my friend Carol's house and we'd play Oregon Trail for hours. The people in our wagon would always be the characters from the television show "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" (Sully, Michaela, Matthew, Colleen, and Brian - and it had to be in that order, otherwise we'd end up with Michaela being the baby, and we couldn't have that!). Unfortunately, one character would always die of Cholera, even though we had a doctor on board. And inevitably Brian would wander off and get lost, or possibly break his leg or something like that, slowing our wagon down. In the later versions of the game, there is a crosshatch to help you aim while you hunt; this was not so in the game Carol and I used to play. In our game, it was all a matter of facing the right direction and shooting at the correct time. It was a difficult game, but probably the most fun I've ever had on a computer, even with all the amazing things we can do on computers now.

We also played things like the Amazon Trail -- a game very similar to Oregon Trail, but in a different settings with different diseases. It was also significantly more difficult to reach the end of the game, and we would usually give up before we finished. Amazon Trail was run through Windows, so we'd have to start up Windows from DOS -- another new skill I had to learn.


Later, we played the early version of various Sim Games, such as Sim City
,

Sim Farm
,

and even Sim Ant (believe it or not)
.

We also played an educational game called MathBlaster
.
I can still remember the dripping sound from the cave and the song that MathBlaster (the character's name and the game's name were one in the same) would sing when he was walking down the hallway of the haunted house. I'm not sure how much I actually learned from this game, but we definately had fun playing it.

Looking up all of these computer games makes me very nostalgic. It also helped me discover that you can download some version of virtually all of these games to play on your computer (though for some, you need an emulator). I may take advantage of these opportunities and waste some time playing old computer games from my childhood days.

My earliest frustration with computers was with the original version of the Sims. I was so excited to buy it that we rushed straight home to load it onto my Dad's computer (which I believe is one and the same as the one from my first memory I shared). We got home only to discover that the Sims needed 3 megabytes of hard drive space -- the same amount as the total capacity of my Dad's hard drive. I was devastated. In order to play the game I desperately wanted, we would have to buy a new computer! Unfortunately, this story has no resolution because of my poor memory.

It wasn't until quite a bit later that I actually began using my computer for non-gaming purposes. Now I use it for the Internet (mainly), word processing, and the occasional game (Solitaire, Minesweeper, and sometimes the Sims 2, if I've got a lot of time to kill). It seems that the more I try to do with computers, the more frustrating they can be. The past year has been frought with constant problems with various parts of my computer and internet. I wonder if it would have been better to simply remain ignorant.

-L