When I was eight, my grandfather got a new iMac 3g, the Bondi Blue, complete with hockey-puck mouse and the wonderful game Lemmings. Whenever I visited I would play the game and learn how to use the computer. Soon after, my father got a PC for my two brothers and I to share. Learning both operating systems simultaneously, I remember finding Windows easier and more intuitive than the Macintosh (no longer the case). On our PC, we brothers would play games like Diablo, Myst, and Doom. As the youngest, I usually watched, but sometimes got the special job of managing the potions or spell book during tough fights. I continued to be an avid gamer, and kept learning and loving computers.

When first trying to figure out the internet, I remember hearing the AOL voice say, “You’ve got mail!”. Amazed by the computer’s knowledge, I went out to check the mailbox. There was no mail, and I never trusted AOL again.

I eventually did learn about email though, a few years later, with my first Hotmail account. I was twelve, so I really didn’t care about my inbox or messages. But my account gave me access to all sorts of great free games on MSN. My favorite was online chess. Chess was already my favorite game, and being able to play it online with thousands of real people was incredible. I could practice more effectively and play all the time! With my computer to help me train, I went on to win several local chess tournaments and even compete in the nationals. Over the years I lost my ability to run a strong Queen’s Gambit, but my love and skill for computers only grew, and continued to help me.

Throughout elementary and middle school, I felt that my computer-savvyness gave me a big advantage. I could do better research online, type papers instead of write them, and solve the problems of my tech-foreign teachers. I learned how to use computers to make art, get news, and type to friends in real time. I even figured out a way to use the internet to get free music! It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

In High school I got Adobe CS3, and began doing animation in Flash, web design with Dreamweaver, and art in Photoshop. As a filmmaker, I also used Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Effects. I used computers for everything and knew a lot about them.  But it wasn’t until OSU that I learned how to program. A civil engineering major at first, I decided to take a computer science class; I changed my major to CS a few weeks later. I loved it immediately, and had no doubt that it was the field for me. That was two years ago. It’s going great, and I have a couple more years to go. One thing I find myself always learning is that I hardly know anything. I went from a sophisticated computer user to an amateur computer scientist. I’m constantly amazed by the enormity and evolution of the discipline, and admittedly daunted by the fact that it is growing much faster than I can hope to learn it! But I will keep trying, and keep looking forward to what I will be able to do with computers in the future.

My Personal Computing History

The first time I ever used a computer was in first grade, sitting in the back of our classroom at the row of then-new, now-ancient Apple Macintoshes. While most of my classmates seemed enthralled by video games, I was already looking for more “productive” uses. My aunt was one of the few people my family knew with a computer and “The Internet”, so I would send her emails from the school computer. I was fascinated by the ability to send messages such long distances so quickly. I still hadn’t quite grasped the concept of The Web, but was already learning to value electronic communication.

The first computers I used were PowerPCs like this one

We got our first computer when I was in about second grade. I went with my dad to browse the options at a local store. Nowadays I make all of the technology decisions in the house, but at that point I was just tagging along for fun. We ended up with a Compaq beige box, loaded with Windows 98 and Microsoft Works. With 32 MB of RAM, a 5 GB hard drive, and a 360 MHz processor, it wasn’t anything to write home about, but was enough to write emails. I didn’t really use the computer much at all for the first few years. My dad cajoled me into learning to type with JumpStart Typing for Kids, the first video game (of sorts) that I ever played. I thought it was incredibly lame, and quickly figured out that you didn’t have to type accurately to win the “free-form typing mode” challenges which let you level-up, you just had to type fast. By holding down the a key long enough, I could win every level. While the game didn’t really serve its intended purpose, I suppose it still provoked me to use some creative thinking skills.

The home screen for the JumpStart Typing game

When I got to middle school, I started to develop a real interest in computers. I quickly became the go-to person for fixing problems, and got my first taste of programming with a lego robotics class. We got our first good computer when my grandparents bought us a Dell Dimension for Christmas. Over the years I’ve upgraded it several times, but it’s still humming along as our primary home computer, and runs Windows 7 smoothly on its Pentium 4 HT. In high school, I finally got my own laptop. With my new-found freedom and the seemingly undefeatable speed of a dual-core processor and a whole gigabyte of RAM!!!, I took off exploring how to put my shiny new machine to use. Today, my desktop computer has a whopping 24 GB of RAM, four times as much as our first computer’s hard drive space, and can chew through anything I throw at it. One has to wonder where it will end. If I have kids some day, what will their first computer look like? Will it be a small device with nearly infinite resources? Or will everyone be using tablets with less physical capacity, and everything running remotely from the cloud?

The impacts of computers on Me aren’t just about Me

One of the biggest ways that computers and the internet in particular have influenced me is with the ability to collaborate with, meet, and learn from other people. I had my first experience with online forums while trying to figure out how to modify the login screen on my laptop. After getting my question figured out, I ended up sticking around and learning more about computers than I had anywhere else previously. I spent some time editing on Wikipedia, before getting tired of the intense bureaucracy there. The site I’ve been the most involved with is the Stack Exchange network. Founded as the programming site Stack Overflow, it’s now grown to encompass everything from English Language to Gardening. Stack Exchange is a Q&A platform, and addresses many of the shortcomings of traditional computer forums. I’m most involved on the computers site in the network, Super User. The system runs on a slightly addictive incentives system with “reputation points” (I’m wont to admit that I’ve got over 12000 of them now). Unlike other sites though, the points mean something – increased reputation unlocks various privileges, which allows for community moderation, from editing to closing posts to even deleting questions. Most moderation is done by regular users, although there are a handful of community moderators. In another unique twist, moderators are elected by a democratic voting system, not appointed by site admins. I was elected to be a moderator this spring, and am still actively involved on the site. In an increasingly interconnected world, it’s important to recognize the worldviews, lifestyles, and perspectives of people from other cultures. I talk with a programmer in the Netherlands. I read essays from students researching biodiesel in Brazil. I’ve made friends with a deaf diabetic from the midwest. The internet was founded on the basis of spreading knowledge and connecting the world, and I feel privileged to have taken a part in that experience.

My family’s first computer was a Dell that ran Windows 95. This computer was given to us by my uncle, who is a computer programmer. The computer was several years old by that point, and he was already using a newer model. My uncle lived several hundred miles away at the time, so the computer was shipped to us. I was five years old at the time, and I couldn’t wait to get the box opened. Until that point, my only experience with computers had been at the public library. At the library there were several computers in the children’s section, and I had seen other kids playing games like Reader Rabbit on them. However, my mom had always forbade me from playing on the computers. It was her belief that the library was for reading books, not playing games.

Once my dad got the computer set up and showed me how it worked, I began trying out the many programs that had been installed on it. Luckily for me, my uncle had a daughter a few years older than me, so there were already several games installed on the computer. My favorite game quickly became Elf Bowling, a relatively simple game in which the player was Santa Claus and the bowling pins were elves. Even though it was a simple game, my mom only let me play on the computer for a few minutes each day, so it never got old. After having the computer for a couple years, I discovered a game called SimCity 2000 which quickly replaced Elf Bowling as my favorite game. It was a city building simulation game, the point of which was to improve a city by building roads and zoning land. However, I mostly just tried to destroy cities by doing things like setting them on fire, which was a lot of fun.

Computers have been influencing me ever since my days of playing games on Windows 95. When I was a freshman in high school, I joined my schools robotics team. I was on the mechanical team, and I enjoyed designing and building parts of the robot. I especially enjoyed working on the drive train of the robot. The first year I was on the team, we did all of our design on paper and made all of the parts manually. While this worked fine for most of the robot, there were certain parts that required a higher degree of accuracy to function well. One of these was the drive train of the robot. It was extremely difficult and frustrating trying to get the chain, sprockets, and wheels to all line up because some of the holes we had drilled were not in the exact position that they should have been.

My second year on the team, we started designing some of the robot on the computer program SolidWorks, a 3D CAD program. We were then able to send our designs to a CNC machine, which is basically a computerized milling machine. This allowed us to create very precise pieces which made working on the drive train much more enjoyable. Our robot also performed much better in the competition than it had the previous year. This experience of designing parts on CAD and having them machined very precisely by a CNC Machine is one of the main reasons I chose to study Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State. SolidWorks is the CAD program used at Oregon State, and I am looking forward to using it and other CAD programs at OSU and after I graduate.

Pictures:

Elf Bowling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elfbowling.png

SimCity 2000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sc2kscr.png

SolidWorks: http://www.sycode.com/products/3dm_import_sw/images/3dm_import_sw.gif