This is a Timex Sinclair 1000 gifted to me by my sister-in-law Mary Ellen.  In 1983-1985 I spent way too much time hand coding in games from dime store magazines into this computer. It was my first venture with coding and precision. I often spent whole days at it. One mistake and the game didn’t work. No we didn’t have the internet to look up bugs or to streamline or simplify the process. No cut/copy/paste. Just good old hand entry of code. I would frequently not eat or be late to pick up my husband at work. No cell phones either. Just a step beyond punch cards. This was a personal computer in those days.

I moved to Alaska in 1985 and didn’t have much time for coding. I started work at the University of Alaska, Anchorage in the School of Engineering. There we had a VAX mainframe computer and some of the professors had IBM personal computers I had a Hewlette Packard workstation that connected to the mainframe. The on switch was a mechanical toggle on the back. You turned on all the peripherals like the screen, modem, printers, etc and then you booted the terminal. 

Shortly after that my Sister-in-law acquired a Commodore from Montgomery Wards. We could connect by dial up modem on our phone line to the university computer where we could chat, email, and share files. It wasn’t quite the internet but closer.

My husband had an IBM ThinkPad from work. On weekends we would use the LYNX browser to access the internet. It wasn’t fast and you didn’t get photos; but, it was exotic and alluring.You still couldn’t talk on the phone and use the line as a modem for the computer. 

I acquired a word processor which was a huge step up from a typewriter. Still not really a computer. Then someone gave me a kaypro II in the early 90’s. They had upgraded so it was an older computer but new to me. It ran ancestry software and games and multiple word-processing options. Still no real internet but we did have email.

The Kaypro was replaced by WebTV and I quickly learned to do email, lists, some social media, and build websites on WebTV and Yahoo. Oh my! This was the rabbit hole. I spent nearly all my time in front of the TV clacking away on the keyboard. After a few years of WebTV my sister-in-law obtained an iMAC. I never used it but my daughter Jean became a real iMAC jockey. I received a few more used computers. Now these were full Windows PCs and I replaced Wordstar and WordPerfect with WORD. I learned to hyperlink and quickly found my way around social media. I began updating then designing and eventually hosting and building websites. By 2004 I had some 200 websites with my name Lazytea on them. 

By 2010 I was proficient in Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML, HTML 5, CSS, Javascript, and I could build W#C compliant websites. Dreamweaver & Corel Paint Shop Pro became my daily work tools. I learned how to manage SQL and build on various content management platforms. I even had my own virtual server until it all came crashing down in the late 2010’s to hackers mostly from Russia. They violated every little flaw in the management coding, server security, and html that they could find. My websites crashed and refreshed. I spent hour upon hour restoring sites only to have them hacked again. Security was too expensive for most of my clients so I was forced to stop hosting and because simply maintaining sites. I enjoyed the work immensely; and I enjoyed working with clients until it came time to manage billing and renweals. I really needed a secretary or financial assistant. I would bill and then the clients would ask for the moon before they paid. They didn’t understand how much I was doing without charging them. Never once did I charge to restore a website or fix some odd thing that they had given me incorrectly in the first place. I grew reluctant to bill. Some people wanted to barter and that was fine. But, domain names and hosting cost me cash so I couldn’t barter for everything.

And, I grew tired of explaining to people that music and gifs from the 90’s just weren’t appropriate on websites in the 2000s. Remember Hampster Dance? Yeah – they wanted their websites to play songs and have dancing hamsters or dogs or whatever. As content and design became separated even farther, I spent even more time explaining that they couldn’t just have something different on every page. It got to be all too much. In 2015, I said goodbye to all but a few websites. 

I had a series of DELL Windows PCs for most of my serious working time. Then, finally this summer after making a big of spending cash with the US Census, I bought myself a MacBook Pro. I love it! It can go with me wherever I go. It’s fast, clean, intuitive and perfect for my lifestyle and online life. 

Seems quite a change from a dial tone phone and Timex Sinclair to an iPhone and a MacBook. Oh and I love my Apple Watch. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring. I’ll get into my thought on social media more in a future post.