Talk Nerdy to Me!  (Not me, I'm a red canoe.)

 My first computer was an Amiga.  Now my ex had a TI99 and I remember that the only day he ever missed work (and we were together 15 years so this is pretty amazing--the only day he missed work)  he played asteroids all day long on the darn thing.  I think we used a cassette tape as a hard drive or disk drive.  

He really loved me back then--he bought me an Amiga computer.  (Kept that TI99 all to himself!)

My baby was made by Commodore.  (Anyone out there remember Commodore 64s?)  It had no hard drive.  You had to do the floppy shuffle. But at least it used little disks in their hard cases--not floppy floppies. 

It was a great computer for the time.  The screen was color and the interface was both point and click (icon based) and DOS.  I used it to write, draw, publish a newsletter about Tule Elk (another post) and to play games like Marble Madness and Tetris.  There was even a little computer club at the Jet Propulsion Lab (I lived near-by) and we'd meet and talk about how to edit the icons and how to organize files.  (PC people in those days were using only DOS--a black or green screen with glow-y white type. And when the PC people used word processors (as I did at work) they had to type in every instruction to format their work  like you do with HTML.) 

Through the computer club I learned about a bulletin board where I could chat with other Amiga users.  This was back in the mid 80s.  Oh...around 1984 when the first MacIntosh came out.  Ahhh....it's coming back to me now.  The friend who got me involved with the Tule Elk Committee had a Mac (now we'd call it a Mac Classic) and it only had a black and white screen and the icon interface.  How limiting!!!!!  

I loved my Amiga so much I tried to get the principal at my school to buy them for the classroom, but they were using those old Apple IIe's. Barbaric!  These used floppy floppies!  And the graphic were clunky!  (He wouldn't buy the Amiga because it wasn't well known.  Eventually Sun acquired them.)

 Anyway, way before AOL was sending out frisbees I tried using the internet--Veronica or Eudora or something (sorry...brain is fading fast---I'm Jughead, but  middle-aged, female and three dimensional.)I'd dail up a number with my phone and there they were on my screen--a group of people to chat with.  The graphic was a picture made of x's of the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair.  I have no idea what I chatted about on this bulletin board.  But it was local--we all lived in LA so we planned a meet-up (though you wouldn't call it that back then.) We met one weekday evening at a software sale at a tiny store in a mini mall in Granada Hills at the north end of the San Fernando Valley.  

There were no avatars, no photos, no way to know what anyone looked like before we got to the sale.  We didn't talk on the phone before our meeting either.

I really, really loved my computer.  I didn't edit icons.  I used my machine to write a newsletter about saving Elk.  I used it to do my homework.  I used it to relax playing Tetris.  (Marble Madness isn't relaxing--go try it, you can find it online.  It's hard and the music is sort of creepy.)  I wasn't really a computer geek--no not me.  I was a writer, I thought.

But I must have been a geek (oh, but not NOW!)  What a surprise it was to see what everyone looked like when we met in the store over twenty years ago! 

Here's a few cute Amigas.   You can use your imagination for the 80s geeks.