I could watch videos documenting the history of computers all day long. Seriously.
I’m sure everyone in my generation likes to say this but I have been in love with computers from a very young age. My dad is a graphic artist, and when I was little, my family had an old, old, Macintosh computer. In the early to mid nineties, however, having a Macintosh and being 10 years old meant you envied all the kids who got to play “Roller Coaster Tycoon” and “The Sims”. But the lack of computer game stimuli forced me to get creative with my Macintosh. I remember using Adobe Illustrator to draw when other kids my age were using MS Paint. I also remember writing stories when other kids were wasting away playing their plethora of video games. When I wasn’t doing those things, I would explore the computer’s file systems and tweak settings (usually to my father’s discontent) But it was this time that I spent with the computer that really made me fall in love with it.
In my short lifetime, I’ve seen computers come SUCH a long way. I remember when I was in middle school, using the first release of iMovie to edit together videos made with friends. I would leave my computer running overnight in order to render the megabytes upon megabytes of footage. Now, ten years later, I am annoyed when it takes longer than 20 minutes to render 15 minutes of 1080i HD video.
These documentaries reminded me how lucky I am to live in the digital age. Everything I want to do in life has been discovered because of the computer and I can’t imagine a world without it.
