I encountered my first computer when I was about 7 or so years old. My parents bought an Apple IIe with a monochrome and a color screen, a daisy wheel printer, and a 5.25" double disk drive. I fell in love with it right away. My parents used it for word processing and database applications; I used it for games. One year, my parents gave me an Apple IIe users guide with instructions on how do programing in Basic. I played around with that for a while, doing strange things like making 40 column pictures with basic programs full of PLOT, HLIN, and VLIN. I started on a text based " Calvin and Hobbes " RPG game, but that one didn't last too long. It was a huge, messy Basic program full of GOTO's, PRINT's, and INPUT's. Not really too much to it, but it was fun while it lasted.

In grade school, I encountered Commodore PET's with their bulky tape drives, and the much nicer Apple IIc's. In middle school, I discovered Apple IIc+'s and the impressive Apple IIGS, one of which I bought for myself. I used Macintoshes a couple of times in summer camp type programs, but I didn't really care for them. It was during one of these summer camp programs that I saw my first MS-DOS computer. Another student had a copy of Space Quest, and I fell in love with it. I bought my own MS-DOS machine, a 386sx with 2MB of ram and a 130MB hard drive. It was a good machine for its time. I got my own copy of Space Quest, Space Quest II, Space Quest III, etc... (Just about all of the early Sierra On-Line titles.) I used more MS-DOS computers in High School, where I became a "student Sys-Admin" of sorts. We live in the school district of a small town, and the computers were only used to teach typing, so they didn't know a whole lot about them. It wasn't until I joined the computer science program at Fredonia State that I found the ultimate operating system, UN*X. The things that you can do in this OS are just incredible.


My computer experience, capabilities, etc. are in my resumé.

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