In the Beginning...

In the beginning, there was the Internet. I remember in the early 70s, in Southern Oregon, when my elementary school had a single computer teletype hook-up to some university somewhere. I was fascinated by this remote machine that you could command, and it would obediently type out a word in Pltword, or play golf, or play Star Trek...
I was too young and in too small of towns to know about machines like the Altair, or the original Apples. I was never rich enough to own an Apple II (back when a floppy drive alone cost 500 dollars), but they were the first computers I actually got to mess with at my high school. I tried to figure out machine language, shape tables, apple basic, and some other fun stuff.
In the early 80s, not being rich enough for an IBM or an Apple, or even for the TRS80, I purchased my first computer, a Commodore 64. 64 whopping kilobytes of memory! Color capability! Sound chip! Sprite animation! Wow! Who could ask for more? I learned a bit about programming (and Poking, and Peeking), but I didn't have a reason for a modem at the time.
Not until later, on my 386 (16 screaming Mhz) , did I start exploring the BBS world (ah, the days of Random Lunacy.)
And then suddenly, I realized that there were things out there on the internet that were more than just programmer stuff, and I began to learn HTML, and put up my own websites. I was never really a programmer, so I never learned C, or Perl, or Java, or the real geek stuff. I've always been a fringe geek, I suppose. I never really got interested in computers and programming for the sake of its geekiness, but only when it related to my other interests.
Besides, to be a real geek took a lot more money than I ever had.
And so, now I am on the blogosphere.
I never imagined such a thing, way back when.