IT Tech Corner

Merry Christmas from IT Tech Corner! 

It is time to share some Christmas memories. According to family legend, when I was a baby, I asked Santa Claus for a Radio Shack computer. It could be that is what my dad coincidentally wanted to get, but however it happened, we ended up with this great computer with a floppy disk and cartridge drive. The computer lived on a proper computer desk in the dining/living room where everyone could see it and there was even room to pull up chairs around it for spectating. 

I spent many hours playing on the computer as a small child, whether it was one of the seven games we had on floppy disk or cartridge like Jumpman, Big Top, or Mouser, or a special game I invented called “numbers” where I would type numbers and look at the patterns they made on the screen. Somewhere around 300 it would get less interesting as the screen was filling up and by 1000 it was really becoming challenging to type new numbers very quickly. 

Christmas for me as a kid was a time when new technology would show up and broaden the mind. New games, new consoles, new devices. And there was time to explore them with friends and family. As we progressed over the years through Super Nintendo and N64, I still enjoyed the Odyssey, and my favorite game, Showdown in 2100 AD, if I could convince someone to control the other player so I had target practice. 

Technology and gaming systems had a sense of community, in my memory, at least in the ability for others to watch if not play along. Fast forward to today - It’s awesome that we have the ability to have high definition images on such small screens like tablets and phones, but this presents different problems and can be a barrier to subtle human interaction and shared experience. While technology nowadays is more and more personal and at times isolating, I hope that we all find ways to have shared experiences around our new video games that Santa brings us for Christmas.