Flipside: Technology--Linda's Awakening

Amy Johnson Crow has a 52 Ancestors Week blog challenge which I have decided to join. I am hoping it may help me to pinpoint someone or something that I have researched and not blogged about on Flipside. AND push me to blog about family each week in 2024. Sometimes I get lazy. 😁 Let's see how well I keep up.

Week # 12 (March 18-March 24) is Technology.

Linda grabs hold of computer technology and doesn't let go. I decided to do this blog about myself. 😀

I am hard pressed to pin an exact date on when the computer entered our home. It was in the early days, internet hookup was through the telephone line (dial-up), everything was very slow, no Google yet, we used Prodigy.

My husband seems to think we had the first home computer sometime in the early 1990's. It was a big bulky Gateway. Ted was adamant that we get the computer. My response, "Go ahead and buy it. I will probably never even use it."

He was so excited when he got home with all the boxes. We set it up in the extra bedroom, plugged it in and pushed the on button. Nothing. Second try. Plugged it in, pushed the on switch and NOTHING! Following a line of expletives, Ted boxed it all up and headed back to the store. Our first attempt was one colossal FAIL.

An hour later, Ted returned with more boxes. Apparently, the first computer was missing its hard drive. Third time was the charm, plugged it in, pushed the on switch and slowly a picture appeared on the screen. Now what? Ted sat down and got all the information necessary into the computer. We still did not have any internet service. We practiced keyboarding, writing gobbledygook and printing it.

There was new language with this invention coming into the house. Typing was called keyboarding. We had to purchase floppy disks to store information. Software, applications, mother board, monitors, processing system, search engines, Microsoft, viruses, worms, phishing, Windows, Mac and on and on.

When the monster was working and we added internet connectivity, I began to, slowly, play around with it. I was actively engaged in genealogy research and decided to use the search engine called Yahoo, to see what I could find.

Through surfing, I found US GenWeb and I was off and running. I was able to locate and email with other folks interested in genealogy who were able to help me in the states and counties where I was tracing ancestors. I could add information and folks contacted me. More genealogical avenues online and to download became available.

Progressing into the late 1990's, I was the one who was spending the most time on the home computer. More sophisticated models were purchased, the home computer was moved into an area in the basement with all my genealogy hard copy nearby. The home computer became MINE.

Remember MySpace? Finding and joining Ancestry, Find-A-Grave, Facebook, Family Tree Maker, my own genealogy home pages, my own blog, Flipside, begun on January 3, 2009, hundreds of on line search engines and probably the most important find for me was was GenaBlogger.

Like most of us, with the advent of laptops, I was able to take my files with me, not just genealogy, all of my files. And my laptop does travel. In fact I am the techie in the family. Always packed is the laptop, iPad, cell phone, all of the connection cords, external hard drive and a power strip.

Although my first response to a home computer was negative, the technology, once I became acquainted, became a daily adventure. Not just genealogy. Building my recipe file, shopping and buying on line, dinner reservations, vacation searches and reservations, gardening information, health, Zoom and Face Time--pretty much everything I do is online. I guess I have become a mouse potato over the past couple of decades. 😁

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