Assignment 1

My first experience with a computer dates back, I would guess, around 18 years ago. I was about the age of three and my grandfather had a computer at his house. I don’t have a clue what its true purpose over there was, but my grandfather and I used it to play some very archaic video games. There were a lot of games on the machine, but the only titles I can remember were Space Invaders and Q*bert, there was another with a knight and a dragon, but I have no clue what that was called. I had no idea how to even turn the computer on, but I could work the joystick fairly well.

This particular machine was later replaced around the age of five, when I got my Super Nintendo. After this, I didn’t see another computer until about 2^nd or 3^rd grade. I went to a private Christian school, so I was lucky to not have computers considered the “devil”, but still, there was not much emphasis on the computer lab time. The time I did spend in there was well spent, once again, on video games. We of course had the Oregon Trail game, which I eventually beat, and some other graphics program where you could select different backgrounds and fill it with skulls or unicorns, or whatever. Even at that age, I was surprised we could toy around with a program with skulls and such things because Halloween was strictly forbidden at that school, so I guess I beat them there. It was also about this time that I was introduced to the floppy disk. Our parents were told to go out and purchase one of these things for out computer lab, but being as that the computer lab wasn’t that important and was probably taking up a pretty large amount of Jesus time, we never got around to using these interesting devices.

After the computer labs of the 3^rd grade, I didn’t see much of computers again until my early teenage years. Napster came out and I finally got to download CDs with Metallica and Black Sabbath songs without my parents (apparently still brainwashed by the church) knowing what I was getting into. By the time I got to high school, I was selected in a drawing to attend a technology school in my area known as Highland School of Technology. My parents were really pushing for me to go here and I still didn’t even know how to type, so it was around this time my family got our first home computer. At school, I learned to type, use Word, Excel and a plethora of other boring programs. However, this was a technology school and was separated into four different fields: Medical, graphic arts and so on… I went into the graphic arts field. I had a wonderful teacher named Don Michael, who is now teaching at UNCC. In his class I learned to use a lot of Adobe programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Unfortunately, Mr. Michael left for UNCC after my first year with him. A new instructor came and I quickly lost interest in pursuing a career in the graphic arts and I was pretty good at that stuff too.

These days, computers, for me, are for writing papers, catching up on heavy metal news, music and other inane things like Facebook. Anyway, this has been a brief history of Jeff Worley’s technological experience.