From Commodore To Pocket Pets

Looking back on my life with technology is an interesting prospect.  The first time that I remember being utterly connected to technology was an old Commodore 64 that lived under the stairs in my house.  It was a constant item of contention between my sisters and I; we all wanted to play the video games that were on those old 3.5 inch discs.  We would all try to wake up early in the morning on Saturdays and try to get to the computer first.  I often lost and would wait till later in the afternoon to play my casual game of Spy Hunter.  However, this was not only a gamer experience but it was also the first computer I wrote a school report on. 

Growing up in the eighties and nineties was an interesting time for growing up with technology.  I don’t remember a period of my life where television was not a part of my daily activities until after I was eighteen.  My parents stole cable from the time I was eight to the time I was twelve and that allowed me cultural as well as secular views of the world to counterbalance the strict religious upbringing that I had.  MTV in the early nineties and the “kids” show Animaniacs were, oddly enough, both a huge influence on my cultural development.

From there, my family, although poor, were always trying to be on the cutting edge of technology.  My mother, an IT help person, always wanted to have the newest hardware to work on at home.  However, she never knew how to work with it.  I did.  I always did know how to fix things on the computer and even now that is a skill that I cherish whenever my wife comes running for help with her Mac.    

Gaming was a huge culture when I was growing and I always seemed to be behind the times.  My friends in my neighborhood were constantly playing video games starting with Mario Bros. then Driver then Gran Turismo then Grand Theft Auto and ending up with Halo.  I always tended to be reading books and sticking to the computer games that I liked, so I was always the worst in that group of friends.  The only console game that I really ever got into was Tony Hawk and I still maintain that I can beat most people at that one. 
             
Around 2001 I started buying music.  This was a dramatic moment in my life, the technology was ripe with change and I was standing in the mist of change.  Music was changing and the rise of Emo in 2003 had a profound effect on me.  I bought music with every paycheck that I got from my supermarket job.  I read reviews and scoured the shelves of record stores looking for the most interesting and unique titles that I could find.  However, in 2005 something changed in my life with music technology: I bought a vinyl record player.  This was around the time that vinyl was coming back into style as a legitimate vinyl format.  It also helped that one of my roommates at the time was huge collector and helped me to see the light.  My first purchase was Styx’s Kilroy Was Here.  Yes, the one with “Domo.”  I quickly started buying more recent bands on vinyl.  The real turning point in my collection was going to England in 2006.  For a music lover, particularly one that has just gotten into vinyl, England was an oasis.  One of my favorite moments was walking into an OxFam store, our equivalent of DI, and finding about $2,000 worth of records for $10.  I couldn’t understand why I had found such a treasure trove of records but then the cashier told me that the biggest radio DJ in Dublin had sent all his excess to this one OxFam store.  Suffice it to say I came home with about 50 pounds of vinyl in my suit case that trip and about the same on the next.  

 The technology surrounding music changed so rapidly throughout the last decade that many people just had to try and keep up.  I was one of them.  I got into downloading and dealt with DRM.  I watched the rise and fall of Napster, Limewire, and The Pirate Bay.  I never used them, except Napster early in 1999.  Unlike the majority of people that went through this same period I always got my music legally.  I purchased a lot, but working at a radio station helped to make my record collection larger, much, much faster.  My work at the radio brought me to new technologies and actually working with hardwiring.  In 2008 I helped to move the radio station at Weber State from one building to another.  This was an enormously difficult task and I worked through some of the wiring with our station engineer.  Music was always something that I loved and the world of technology always bled through it.

There have been lots of other areas I could talk about in terms of technology that has influenced my life.  I mean really, the last two decades have given us a wonderful amount of technology to wonder over from terrifying (Star Wars missile program, ICBMs, biological weapons) to fun (Ieverythings, console games, IMAX movies) to completely inane (pocket pets, the resurgence of 3D movies, USB albums).  However, these few moments in my life really defined my life with technology: fun but insightful and focused on making my life more interesting.