Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Did You Have a Shared Family Computer Growing Up? (theverge.com)
theodp writes: "Long before phone addiction panic gripped the masses and before screen time became a facet of our wellness and digital detoxes," begins Katie Reid's article, How the Shared Family Computer Protected Us from Our Worst Selves, "there was one good and wise piece of technology that served our families. Maybe it was in the family room or in the kitchen. It could have been a Mac or PC. Chances are it had a totally mesmerizing screensaver. It was the shared family desktop." She continues: "I can still see the Dell I grew up using as clear as day, like I just connected to NetZero yesterday. It sat in my eldest sister's room, which was just off the kitchen. Depending on when you peeked into the room, you might have found my dad playing Solitaire, my sister downloading songs from Napster, or me playing Wheel of Fortune or writing my name in Microsoft Paint. The rules for using the family desktop were pretty simple: homework trumped games; Dad trumped all. Like the other shared equipment in our house, its usefulness was focused and direct: it was a tool that the whole family used, and it was our portal to the wild, weird, wonderful internet. As such, we adored it." Did you have a shared family computer growing up? Can you relate to any of the experiences Katie mentioned in her article? Please share your thoughts in a comment below.
In junior high, we had Teletypes and Decwriters with acoustic coupler modems (300 Baud) for access to the DEC TSS-8 system shared by my whole school system. The TSS-8 had sixteen dial-in ports. We had to reserve time on a terminal a week in advance. Even then, all of the phone lines to the system's computer might be busy and we might never connect during our sign-up time. We had to store our assembler, Fortran, and Basic programs on paper tape. The 128kB of disk space was reserved for teachers.
Home computers? I was almost out of college by then.