trip down memory lane: the first computer game i played, smurfs hermit crabs, IBM ps/2 at bank

sunday Jul 1, 2018

i'm still alive.

i'm going to take a trip down memory lane.

when i was in second grade my school presented the first personal computer i ever saw, it only had 1, it was a demo and it had one game we could play.

none of us secondgraders at the 80s have ever seen or heard of a computer. it was in the school library.

it was an apple 2c with a 9 inch green monochrome monitor



we were all begging to have our turn  us second graders.

this is in stark contrast to today's kids, i've seen 3 year old todlers with tablets and iphones in their hands. and it seems by 5 many kids have a facebook, iphone and youtube account

the first game i ever played on the apple 2 c was

Conan: Hall of Volta



i had to take turns with other kids, for all of us it was the very first time we saw a computer.

for me and several others, we were hooked. i also used my imagination to imagine being conan and being this world, something i'd do over and over again.

later i would visit an arcade where you pay a quarter for a token to then play the arcade games

one game i really enjoyed similar to this was Legend of Kage



second grade was also when i first saw a newt, there was a newt in the classroom, the teacher had us kids clean the bowl
which if you think about it could cause a salmonella outbreak



the year before that i saw at my friends' house for the first time a hermit crab.

second grade was also when there were saturday morning cartoons this is in the 80s

and one engaged my imagination was the original smurfs cartoon. it was fun to see these smurfs go off an adventure.

during this time, Bruce Lee and kung fu tv shows were aired on tv. i watched Bruce Lee using martial arts to beat up lots of bad guys.

the karate kid was one of the first movies i've seen at the theater. it was fun.

a few years later, around third grade and beyond, i was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons.

i became enamored with this game



i was enchanted when part of the game, after the graveyard you enter weeping willow trees and ghosts would come flying out. i thought that was a cool thing.

when i was entering high school i visited a local bank, the bankers were wearing suits,

and the bank seemed rich, with marble or granite floors, glass booth

all the bankers were sitting or near a computer that looked like this



it was the first time i saw such computers, it didnt' look like any computer i had ever seen, only a bank had it at the time, and i remember
thinking that this is the future. it looked like a pc from the future. it looked good.

they weren't playing games on it though. it had numbers on it.

when i attended and visited college, they had computer labs with pc's like this, which i now know as ibm ps/2

i thought the future of the world is adults sitting in front of an ibm ps/2 typing in numbers. completely replacing pc's that have gone before.