My First Computer

I had purchased a Commodore 64 to help with my Acolyte Master role at church.

It hooked up to your TV screen instead of a separate monitor.  I had a 9-pin dot matrix printer that used fanfold, pin feed paper.  

Google Commodore 64 if you have an interest.  

One of the first things I used the computer for was organizing the Acolytes at church. I used the C64 to create an alphabetical list of trained acolytes, and what they were trained to do.  I also used the C64 to create a schedule for each Sunday of the month.  The C64 also came in handy for writing and printing out training documents that went step by step through the whole service.

I had just come into the computer age!!!!! I realized how many other uses I could make of my little C64.  It even had a 5.25” Floppy drive 

to store my files on. Kind of like Joyce’s dad, I went into this hobby whole hog.  Just not to the extent he did.

I started seeing more computers at AT&T and started taking an interest in them.  I worked the night shift a lot during this time and could play around with the desktops at work during my downtime.  

My job at this time was trouble-shooting voice and data circuits.  There also came along an opportunity to use computers to test the circuits at AT&T.  I jumped at the chance and worked several years in the SARTS group. SARTS means Stand Alone Remote Test  System.  Up until this time all testing was done on a cord board. Cord board testing involved physically cross-connecting cords from the test equipment and plugging them into the circuit to be tested.  SARTS did all the cross connecting electronically.

For several years, I was a semi-nerd.  I eventually outgrew my Commodore 64, and got a PC. I learned how to replace boards in my tower computer at home.  OH! and we had a 56KB modem hooked to our phone line. 

Of course no one in the house could use the phone while the modem was online, but that was ok with me.

In the beginning ... (Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. From one of Fr. Ralph’s sermons.) there was not a lot of reason to go online. There was no internet yet, no Amazon, no Google.  The reason you went online was to connect to other users on Message Boards.  Kind of like today’s chat rooms, but totally text driven. Each message board had a specific topic that was discussed.  You could ask other users questions, and someone would usually respond with the answer.

You could also use the modem to connect to larger mainframe computers belonging to companies, but again all the menus were text driven.

Enough about computers. My residual nerdism is showing.