Computer History|Computer hardware / software over the past 20 years.

When I was much younger, my favorite computer software was Print Shop, originally published in the 1980s. All of the Apple computers in the schools I went to had this software available. Back then, getting time on a computer was a privilege reserved for about once per week, as the entire school would share a group of about 20 computers. Now it seems all public schools have banks of computers lining the walls of each classroom. Surely the students don’t even realize how amazing that is!

At any rate, when I had my few precious minutes of computer free time, I always asked for the Print Shop floppy disks. I marveled, each time, at how many different things I could create. Having grown up learning Basic programming and going to sleep-away camp for Basic, it was simply amazing to me that I could print up banners and pictures with the words I wanted on them—without having to write 100 lines of programming without errors. Oh how I don’t miss those gigantic programming books. As an 8 year old without keyboarding skills, typing in all the lines for a single game could take me all afternoon, only to get an error message and spend several more hours hunting down my errors. I will say this, though—when I occasionally stuck with a program long enough to find all the bugs and get it to work, it didn’t matter how lame the game was. The satisfaction of getting it to run put me on Cloud Nine!