MWF 2010 authors on… their first computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Classic
She was a first gen Mac, I was but a starry-eyed Year Eight student.
We got to touch for thirty minutes a week. Mostly awkward fumbles with a square mouse playing Minesweeper while humming Go West’s ‘We close our eyes’.
I don’t so much remember my first computer as my first word processor. It was called ‘Multimate’ and they put ‘mate’ in the title just to try to defuse the inevitable falling out that would occur within fifteen minutes of the user getting acquainted. The Ctrl key was a big part of Multimate, as was the Shift key and the Alt key. If you wanted to, say, indent the paragraph, the user would have to press Ctrl, Shift and Alt all at the same time, punch in some IBM function keys with his forehead while trying to elbow the spacebar.
As I grow older, I plan to bore children by telling them about the Commodore 64. ‘You know that wasn’t 64 megabytes, it was 64 kilobytes. What we would have given for even 64 megabytes. And yet we still had fun. ‘Choplifter’, kids. Look it up online. You can still have fun with 64 kilobytes.’
Angela says…
Silkworm FTW.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Posted on 24 August 2010, in Author info and tagged Andrew Humphreys, first computers, Matt Blackwood, MWF authors on, Tony Wilson. Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 
My first computer was a vicious IBM dinosaur that waited until the day before due-date on the 50 thousand word thesis I had written for my Folger Library research into French Reformation pamphlets (all translated from the 16th Century archaic French by me)
to devour everything beyond my ability to recuperate anything.
One more-savvy-than-I managed to (almost) awaken Lazarus and rescued a document half full of glyphs and symbols and mumbo-jumbo.
Good thing I still had my notes.
Happened again rather recently with a chapter of my novel on a HP Pavilion that oftentimes thought I was joking when I hit ‘Save’ and a week’s work was never to be seen again.
I now have a Mac, two external hard drives as well as a massive backup thinggy and Time Machine.
Eat me now!