I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology has weaved it’s way through my life starting at a pretty early age. I’m not quite old enough to have experienced room sized computers or punch card programming but I have, I think, a few obscure technology experiences from my youth. A family with the economic standing of mine had no business owning computers in the 1980s, but we somehow managed to have quite a string of them, beginning here:
My first computer: Coleco Vision Adam.
photo credit: Veronica Belmont
Even in the early-mid 1980s this seemed an odd little machine. When flipped on it was a shell of a machine. If I recall correctly, it defaulted to word processor mode unless software was loaded into it. The double deck cassettes were not there for show. Unless you first loaded BASIC from one cassette and then your game or program from another you were not going anywhere.
I must have been among the lucky few to not experience major problems with this computer. In fact, the last time I saw my ADAM was around 1993. My Aunt was still using it as a glorified typewriter!
It was on this computer that I typed in my first bits of code. I don’t know that my coding skills have improved all that greatly over the years. This early coding consisted of making a little turtle move around the screen. I see now, from doing a bit of, that I could have done much more than make a turtle move, but hey, I was 9 years old, at the most.
This was not only a computer but also a gaming console. A slot in the top of the unit accepted Coleco game cartridges. As a special bonus we owned the Atari expansion unit which allowed us to play the games for the Atari unit.
For an extra bit of fun above is a video of a game that I remember playing often.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieqgT-SRrXM
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