What’s this? I’m trying to blog once a day for 50 days! Inspired by Forking Mad and Lou Plummer.

What do you remember about your first computer and learning to use it?

My first computer was an old Compaq computer from my uncle. I installed Windows 98 SE on it and pretty much felt like the smartest guy ever. It had a CD ROM drive, a 3 1/2” floppy drive, and a 5 1/4” floppy drive. I spent a lot of time digging through my dad’s old boxes of floppies and checking out what was on them - I found a lot of great shareware that way! Eventually I also leared how to (somewhat) properly image these disks and I still have the images to this day.

My dad linked up the computers in our home (two, at the time) into a network so we could share files, chat, and play games over the LAN (the computers were about three feet apart and facing away from each other, so the utility of chat was not very high.) The computers were named after Shrek characters - Shrek and Donkey - a naming convention that persists in the Rysavy house to this day! My dad’s home server is called “Boots,” but over the years we have had several more iterations of Shrek, Donkey, a Fiona, a Gingy (my third computer)… and probably others that I am not aware of or have forgotten.