PART 1: THE EARLY YEARS

I'm no computer scientist, but I consider myself a pretty seasoned user. This post is to give, as briefly as possible, a little background to my eventual computing meltdown. It'll be a short trip down Memory Lane for some of you, I'm sure.

I started using a PC back in 1987, during my senior year of college. It was a pretty lame setup, but it worked. I went out and got three 5 1/2 inch floppy disks. One was for the DOS operating system and another held Professional Write, both of which a friend at the library copied for me. I also had a "Files" disk onto which I saved ... you guessed, my word-processing files. Those disks lasted me years, and I never filled up that Files disk with all the work I did on that thing. Oh yeah, each disk held something like 720-1200 kilobytes. As Jim Morrison said: "In those days, things were simpler and more confused." I had no idea what I was doing; I just knew how to do what I had to do. I could boot up a machine, remove the DOS disk, insert the Professional Write disk in Drive A: and the Files disk in Drive B:, and off I ran. I had very few problems, but then again, I did very little.

A couple of years later, I walked into a computer lab on campus during grad school, and I saw this dinky little computer with a tiny screen and a small floppy drive. It was a Mac, though I had never heard of one. I needed to write a paper, and I managed to eek it out using AppleWorks or something like that. Things looked funny and felt funny, especially the mouse, but it got the job done. Not many people used that lab, and I liked the fact that I didn't have to wait in line, so I went out and got some new disks, and I was ready to do my work on PC or Mac. In fact, for some bizarre reason that I can't explain now, I bought a Sharp laptop computer with two 3 1/4 inch floppy disks and no hard drive back in 1991. I'm not sure why I did it, but it might have had something to do with a teaching job I'd just gotten at a local community college, and I needed to write worksheets, quizzes, and exams from home. The laptop came with PFS FirstChoice, which was like an office suite containing my favorite word processing program, Professional Write. Life was pretty good.