I remember one of the first times using a computer in the 90s. I would have been around 4 when my parents first let me use the computer. They had an old HP that would scream as it would dial-up to the Internet. The first time I heard that sound, I remember being taken aback because it was so off putting. It quite literally sounded like a phone call from hell was happening. Once it was turned on and connected, my Dad pulled out a series of disks (or maybe it was floppy drives!?) and started installing one of the first video games I ever played: the 1997 adventures of Ready to Read With Pooh.
I loved it! I had never played anything like it before. I love the mini games, being able to click a mouse and watch the screen light up, and interacting with the digital world that was at my fingertips. My parents loved that I was learning something too. A few years later, my next game-of-choice was Freddi Fish, parts 1 and 2:
I loved the problem solving of the game and the "detective-like" nature of it's game play. Little did my parents know the can of worms they were opening up introducing me to this digital world. While I loved playing games, I didn't have too much access to the internet until I was in elementary school.
The first time I ever got on the internet was in the Brookside Elementary computer lab. The teacher had this long address written on the board that would take us to the school's home page and she instructed us to copy the whole thing down into our Internet Explorer. I think it took us about 10 minutes to find where the slashes were and navigate the keyboard enough to put the full address in! I remember making a spelling mistake and having to go over it all again because I didn't know that I could use the arrow keys to move around.
As I got older, the thing that got me into using the Internet on a regular basis was playing flash games with my friends. My parents had a shared computer for us to use, so it was difficult to get screen-time. However, I had a friend down the street that had his own computer, so we would spend afternoons at his place trading off playing games on the computer or games on his Xbox. I remember looking up Youtube videos for the first time, too. The dial-up sound was gone, but the wait time still existed. Anytime I wanted to show my friend a video, we would pull up the video, go in the other room for 10 minutes, and then come back when the grey loading bar was almost full on the bottom of the screen. Now, I get frustrated with my phone if the video doesn't load right away! It's wild how much things have changed with the Internet and are still changing to this day.
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