As mentioned in a recent post, much of my earliest computer use was some form of gaming, mostly freeware but some purchased.

For personal letter writing and other kinds of business uses, Apple Works was the go-to program. One particular use of Apple Works in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s consumed a significant amount of my free time. I organized a fantasy baseball league and served as its first statistician. I kept all the league stats in spreadsheets and manipulated and printed weekly reports for each owner using the database function. As I think back, I almost have to laugh at how relatively primitive it was having to manually enter the stats of every American League player (taken from sports section of the Tuesday edition of USA Today) into a spreadsheet. A colleague, who was statistician for a companion National League based fantasy league, used dBase and was able to download the data and avoid the manual labor I went through, but my operation was not that sophisticated. And, as I remember it, the data available for download was not in a compatible format for my use.

Very early, one of the primary reasons I bought a computer in the first place was I wanted to learn how to write programs, possibly for use in my teaching at the university. In an earlier post about my game programming/coding I detailed some of the fun I had with that.

A little later (mid-1990’s), I also dabbled with learning and using HTML. The college where I worked was an early adopter of technology and was one of the earliest to have a college website. In addition, it provided disk storage space (the early cloud concept) online for employees to create their own personal web sites. That is what triggered my learning of HTML. Knowledge of HTML was quite useful as I had professional pages on the college web site to help promote the school and especially for recruitment of new faculty.

Also, in the 1990’s, I got involved in some early ‘social networking’ via newsgroups. That was then a primary way to connect with others online who had similar interests.

With the creation of the World Wide Web and its subsequent rapid expansion, many more things were possible and available online. For example, I had some fun with a financial site that provided a stock market game as a way to learn about investing. I recall playing that game for a several years and probably should have made real investments, but alas did not. How quickly Amazon appreciated even back in the late 1990’s into the early 2000’s should have been a signal to buy!

Reminiscing about all these past uses has been somewhat fascinating. I certainly have evolved in my computer usage.

As anyone who used personal computers in the early 1980’s knows, back then all software was loaded by floppy disk drive (the original 5 ¼ inch) into the internal memory (RAM or Random Access Memory) of the computer each time you used the software. And, of course, RAM was limited. In the case of my Apple II+ it was 48K!

At that time I used an Apple at my office as a new academic administrator mostly using a word processor (Apple Writer at first, then what I thought was much better, Word Juggler) but also worked briefly with the early spreadsheet software, VisiCalc.

At home, I used the word processor and spreadsheets, but early on, mostly played games.

I don’t recall when Apple Works first came out, but that more or less revolutionized my use of productivity software as that single program included word processor, spreadsheet, and database components. For many years, that was my standard. As I recall, I also had a hard drive by the mid-1980’s.

In the early 1990’s with the invention of the World Wide Web, many new products became available to take advantage of it. The earliest browser, Mosaic, was primitive but far better than the other options for searching online. In the years that followed I tried many different software offerings. Development was so fast that upgrades and new ideas meant constantly experimenting with the possibilities.

Sometime in the 1990’s a kind of all-in-one product was introduced call the Internet Suite. Several developers took the concept of including browser, newsgroup reader, HTML editor, and email system all in one package. I used Netscape Navigator that became Netscape Communicator, SeaMonkey, MSN Explorer, and a few others as I explored what I liked.

Eventually, by the late 1990’s, I was using Pegasus mail as the supported email software at work so used it almost exclusively at home as well. I found Hot Dog by Sausage Software the best HTML editor at that time and used it for a while when I had my own Web page.

In the office productivity universe back then, Novell was the one we used at my college, probably because our whole fiber optic network on campus was run by the Novell system. We used WordPerfect and Quattro Pro and used the Corel Presentations for public presentations. By about 2000, we were beginning to also support Microsoft Office, so one of the tech support people did presentations to teach us how to use it to its full potential.

On a business trip to the Seattle area in 1995, a group of us academic administrators went on a tour of the Microsoft facilities and were each given CDs with the newly released Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. So, I installed Windows 95 and started using Office some at home.

My next job in 2001 moved me into the Microsoft world almost exclusively, even though I really preferred the Novell products. That college was migrating to Microsoft servers for their network and decided their software was a better fit for it.

I have used Microsoft Office ever since, although about a year ago (now retired and no conflict with work expectations) we moved our email use to Thunderbird (Outlook 2016 was acting up) and browser to Firefox (better security) exclusively. I’ve stuck with Word, Excel, and Access, although I tried OpenOffice, now LibreOffice, and did not like them much. I use GoogleDocs some, but only for certain things when I want to share editing.