Open Elements

I was recently trying to think back to my first computer; I remember that I lived in Los Angeles at the time and my grandma would sometimes take me to the Glendale Gallerias. If you don’t know about the Glendale Gallerias, just picture a huge fancy mall. They had a Radio Shack and every time we walked by it, I would plead and beg obsessively to my grandma to please buy me a computer; which I’m sure didn’t sound pretty.

I had pleaded so many times to her and somehow one day it worked and she agreed to buy me one of the least expensive models. I was thrilled! I had never used a computer before and didn’t even know what they were used for; the only thing I knew was that I had to have one. It was the summer of 1985. I was 13 and had only been in this country for 2 years.

Back in those days, Radio Shack carried Tandy computers; I don’t remember the exact model I had now, but I suspect it was the Tandy Color Computer 2. In many ways, this was the beginning of life in America for me as I began to take part in the PC phenomenon.

As I recall, one of my fondest memories with this computer was that it had the ability to produce sounds. The computer manual provided some examples to get you going using BASIC programming language.

One of the drawbacks of my Tandy computer was that it had a very limited amount of memory. I remember this very vividly because I wasn’t able to save any of the music programs that I wrote, which would sometimes take hours to complete. I would have to start from scratch each time I used the computer.

This wasn’t the best solution, but at least I had a computer to experiment with and I believe it made me a better typist. A year or so later I discovered that I could plug a tape recorder to my Tandy computer and save my programs to a cassette. If you remember cassettes, the cool thing about them was that you could record over the same cassette many times. It didn’t take me long to save up my money and buy the tape recorder from Radio Shack. That tape recorder changed things drastically because I could start writing something half-way, save it and come back to it another day.  Back then this was a huge improvement!

How about you? I’m interested to hear about your first computer story in the comments section. How old were you when you got your first computer? What type of computer did you have?