My earliest encounter with a computer was probably in 1991; I was in first grade at school. I remember our class had a time slot each week where we were able to go to the computer lab. My classmates including myself were always excited each time we went. Personal computers were new to everyone, so being able to use my own computer was very cool to me. The machines we used were old Apple computers with large bases and small, thick monitors. The screens were green without any color, so they were sometimes hard to see. We used the huge 4x4 inch floppy disks to play very simple math, and English games. A few years later I remember using the hard 3.5-inch floppy disks to play different games such as Oregon Trail and Dr. Quandary.
For Oregon Trail you created a family, gave them food and supplies, and helped them venture the Oregon Trail. You had to be sure not to allow your whole group to die or you would fail. I actually thought the game was challenging, I only made it to the end a few times. 
Dr. Quandary was a game where you start out at a shooting gallery at a fair. I can’t remember how, but you ended up on an island. On this island you had to try and escape by completing different mathematical and logical puzzles, and you got an ingredient for each puzzle you completed. All the ingredients were then used to brew a potion to teleport you back to reality. Around 1995 Microsoft created a program called windows. Instead of booting programs from DOS, you could now use this new interface-friendly program to double-click on the program you wanted to run from your desktop. When Microsoft created Windows 98, my Dad bought our family a Dell desktop computer with a Pentium II processor. The monitor was very big, and the graphics were significantly improved. We also had a dial-up internet connection at the time with AOL, so the World Wide Web was now available to us. This was the time I learned how to use e-mail, but I used Instant Messenger much more. It was a convenient, easy way to talk to my friends simultaneously. A couple years later, when I was in middle school, Napster came out. This program was awesome because you could download any song you wanted straight to your hard drive instead of going out and buying a CD and only listening to maybe 4 or 5 songs on it. Around this same time, high speed internet became available for use. Dial-up modems were history. Getting online was now instant, and browsing the web was considerably faster. Today, I do not think I could survive without the internet. I rely on it for a number of things including e-mail, search engines such as Google for basically anything I want or need to know, news, gaming, and browsing the web. Computers have evolved so much in the past 20 years and I am looking forward to what they have in store for us in the future.
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My first computer was a Tandy Radio Shack with tape record that held the program. We played the game Hammurbi. I hated losing since I did not know the rules, so I learned how to read the code (in Basica), figured out the rules and then changed them.
This was my first experience in programming...still addicted to it.
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