Tim Whitfield: Building a Techy: How to put the tech in Techy, Part One

I am often asked how much schooling I have done to become so knowledgeable in computers. Truth is I took one computer science course at Fresno State (which I eventually dropped) and a typing class in High School. My college degree is in Social Science, not Technical Studies and I don’t hail from Stanford University. I am a homegrown Techy that just naturally understood computers.

I was big on the video games of my time. The original Nintendo Entertainment System came out when I was just one year old. I don’t remember that far back but I do remember getting my very own from Santa on my fifth birthday. I immediately fell in love with the very 80’s techno music and those loveable characters who had their own afternoon series. Who are they? You guessed it, Mario and Luigi. There were times when I was glued to that screen with my mom constantly yelling get back from the TV your going to hurt your eyes. I wonder if it did, considering my glasses are so thick these days.

It wasn’t long before I needed to type up long book reports. The family manual typewriter served our needs for a while, but I hated having to type the same paper three times just to get an acceptable copy to turn in to my teacher. My family soon purchased an electric typewriter. It was very cool. I liked to use it so much that I knew all of the functions it did in and out.

When my mother decided to return to school, we purchased a Brother Word Processor. It was a hybrid between a computer and a typewriter. You could save your work and come back and type later and it had solitaire on it. It didn’t take me long to master that machine either.

In the meantime, I was playing with Apple 2e’s at my school with all sorts of neat games and capabilities. I was making banners from Print Shop and printing them out on the old Apple Imagewriter dot matrix printer. I could travel to Rio de Janeiro to catch Carmen Sandiego with the placement of a 5 ½ inch floppy disk and the click of a button or two.

When the computer lab at my school got upgraded to Intel class computers running Windows 95, I was very excited. I got very familiar with the Start bar at this point and MS Works 6.0 and MS Word 97. Around the same time I was able to start playing with a Packard Bell computer that my uncle had brought to my grandma’s with Windows 3.1. It had AOL!

Next time I’ll talk about Netscape Navigator’s Composer, Microsoft Frontpage ’97 and beyond.

Click here for Part II

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