Stardate 1724: First Contact With Computers

So thinking back on my first real contact with computers is pretty fun. It's funny to think about some of the things that were so cool then and see how simple they were. I can remember on of the things that took up a lot my time in relation to computers was the ever addicting game of Solitaire. I'd get bored of hanging out with my brother or what is probably more likely he'd get bored of my bothering him and send me away and where would I go but to the computer. Now at this point in my life, maybe 5th or 6th grade, maybe 7th, we weren't privileged enough to have the fanciness of the internet and even when we did get the internet it was a ridiculously slow dial-up, so what was there to do on the computer. Games! I quickly got tired of the monotony of Minesweeper so that left really only one decent game, Solitaire. I'd play Solitaire for hours on end. I loved it! Why, I'm really not sure because I wasn't all that great at it, but I loved it just the same. Apart from Solitaire and a super slow internet connection, one of my other early computer memories is Oregon Trail. Oh the days of fording the river, breaking a wheel and having all my oxen die! My first contact with this glorious game came in 6th grade. This was the first year I can remember having a computer in the classroom at school that wasn't specifically reserved for the teacher. This computer had the game Oregon Trail loaded onto it. Therefore, this was the only time that students wanted to stay in from recess. We would beg the teacher to let us stay in one or two at a time and play Oregon Trail while the rest of our class was out playing kickball or something of the sort. An added bonus was then we would be the only 2 people that didn't smell completely disgusting! The third thing that I remember as a early contact with computers is never having the minimal requirements to run the computer games I wanted to play. We had a rather plain Windows based computer, probably a Dell or HP, I can't remember exactly, and there were several games that I bought and either couldn't run at all or couldn't run well on our computer. I remember buying the Triple Play 2001 baseball game and trying to load it onto our computer. It took what seemed like 4 days to load all the aspects of this game so by the time it finished loading I was dying to play. I click start to begin playing and it loads up the first game and I quickly came to the realization that the video card in our computer was vastly inferior to what it would need to play this game smoothly. Everytime the camera angle would change it would freeze for a couple seconds then be all jerky, which when you're playing against a computer who has no mercy and keeps running even though you can't see where the ball is, it got really frustrating. So between slow internet, skipping recess to live life in the old west and classic video games that might or might not work, I had an interesting first few experiences with computers.