Jenny and Dave left Friday morning to go to Williamsburg and Grant's wedding. They will be home sometime today. Tonight the 4 of us will go out to Ruth's Chris' Steak House. It is one of our favorite places to go when Jenny is in town. They will leave on Wednesday to go to Boston for a few days and then on to New Hampshire and Dave's sister's high school graduation.
Sometimes I feel lonely. John is busy with his job and when he comes home he immediately gets on the computer to do all of his work emails. I spend hours a day at the computer myself. I can't believe how much time we both spend just sitting here doing what we do on the computers. Actually, it is kind of cute. We have the computers set up side by side in our family room. John has a pc and I have a Mac. I don't know what I would do without John around to help me with everything technical. When I have any sort of problem with the tv or my mac or anything electronic, he is Johnny on the spot. He just understands those things, or actually knows how to figure them out. I am not smart with things like that at all. I do remember that it was back in 1989 and I was just beginning to hear a lot about computers and I thought this is going to be something really important someday. I wanted one!! John and I talked about it and he would ask "what will we do with it?"..I told him that I had no idea but I would figure it out.
When we went to buy it, we went to Radio Shack and I remember that we had the option of getting one with or without a hard drive. Without the hard drive, we would just always have to put a disk in. We opted for the 20 meg hard drive. Not knowing why we would need it or what we would do with it. I think 20 megs is like a grain of salt in a hard drive of today. So, there we were with this computer and nobody knew what to do with it. I read in the paper that the local community college had computer classes starting. It was BEGINNING DOS. I signed up for the course. After that, I took INTERMEDIATE DOS and I was learning how to move around in DOS. This was way before they ever had Windows. I learned how to do a spreadsheet and how to put a document on the pc and print it out. As I learned these things, I taught them to the children. We bought software and were playing a lot of games and I was communicating with a local "chat" group. We also got PRODIGY, which was I suppose one of the first interactive software programs that let us connect with the world. I was on it every single day and I eventually made friends with other "Stay at Home" moms and it was a daily thing for me to get on Prodigy and talk to my friends who were spread all over the USA. There were 10 of us and we met every single day and would spend hours chatting back and forth. It was actually more like emailing and when we would write to one, it would go to all. We kept up with each other's lives for over 4 years. I am still in close touch with one of those ladies. She lives near San Francisco and we all met her family when we were visiting John's mother. She recently came to DC for a convention and I spent time with her. She has 2 sons and the youngest was being potty trained then and I think he recently finished college!!! Where did the years go.
But progress came creeping along and Prodigy went by the wayside and Windows took over and all of a sudden everyone had a computer. How could we live without it...How did we ever live without it. I remember first hearing about the "internet" and how the world would someday all be connected at this one central place. I couldn't grasp it. I didn't believe it, but hey, look where we are now.
I'm glad we got that first computer. My children learned the keyboard and did their homework papers on the computer very early on. I can't help but wonder what all the changes will be during the next 20 years. We have come so far these past 20 years.
I remember those conversations with you on Prodigy. Good times!
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