The Writers’ Take
For Christopher, it was the Nintendo 64. “Video games got me into technology since I was a child,” and this led to him working with PCs. “Video games captured my imagination as a child but also gave me a degree of tech-savviness that evolved into full enthusiasm over time.”
Mahesh started out playing games as a child as well but also enjoyed worked with apps on a Pentium-I when he was in third grade. “Playing games on it and working around apps like MS Word and Excel made me realize how powerful computers were, and I could easily see their potential as to what great things they could achieve in the future.”
Derrik started when he was young as well on a PC from his parents’ work that originally ran Windows 98 and later Windows XP and Debian. “That computer and I went through everything. I took it apart, messed with the parts and learned how everything worked. I learned about operating systems and even some networking stuff too.” It was a similar experience that brought Miguel his love of technology when his mom got him him a PC at the age of 8. “I started fiddling with the OS a bit. It was a yummy experience. At 10 I got my own computer, took it apart, broke it, then fixed it.” He realized “those five painful hours in which I was basically trying to fix something in tears seemed like a lot of fun!” Judy started with a more simpler device, but it didn’t lessen her enjoyment. She spent one of her first summer job paychecks as a teen on a WebTV. “It just woke up my interest in knowing how everything worked and why it worked the way it did.” She became a “chat addict” and loved that she could “communicate with people in another country with ease.”
Phil’s love of technology may have started decades before we had personal PCs, that but didn’t lessen the experience for him. It was a Viewmaster 3D, “a tiny grey plastic photo viewer into which you inserted circular reels with matched pairs of 3D photos on it. Lying on the bed with my face right under the room light around 1966 looking through reel after reel of 3D vistas from around the world, I wondered if in the future we might be able to see anywhere in the world.” Now fifty years later, “we have Google Street View and VR.” As for myself, I came into it when personal computers were on the scene but way before they were the norm. It was 1983 and I was a computer typesetter and using a pre-programmed computer with much coding to do my work. It fascinated me so much I quit college to do it full time. Five years later I sat behind an Apple Mac IIx, and I was amazed at being able to do my typesetting without coding and with only visuals.
Your Turn
We all took slightly different paths and in certainly different eras, but we all ended up at the same place. How about you? Do you have a love of technology? If so, with what device did it all begin for you? Let us know below in the comments section. Josuewiki1990, Shankar, and allaboutapple.com via Wikimedia Commons
