Long before laptops, before the internet, before any of the tech I write about now, there was a beige Tandy 1000 SL sitting on a desk, and it changed everything for me.
I got that Tandy for Christmas 1989, when I was only 14 years old. It didn't have a hard drive. It ran on 512kb of memory, which sounds impossible now, and everything lived on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. I added a 3 1/2 inch drive later on, but in the beginning it was all 5 1/4.
Not long after, I got a copy of WordPerfect 5.1, free from school I think. I'm not sure it was fresh off the shelf, but it felt brand new to me either way. That program became one of my favorite pieces of software ever.
Looking back, that's exactly where my passion for writing was born. If you want the long version of everything that came after, I told the whole story in my AuguStory post.
I'd write my stories and poems on one disk, then save them onto a totally separate disk. Two disks, swapping in and out, just to write and save a single document. It was clunky. It was tedious. And I loved every second of it.
I remember sitting there for hours, just playing with the program, trying every feature, writing story after story. There was something magic about watching my words show up on that screen, knowing I was making something with a machine that felt like it belonged in the future.
I think I still have those floppy disks somewhere in storage. If I ever dig them out, I'm taking a photo and showing you. Those little disks probably have some of my earliest stories and poems sitting on them, untouched for over 35 years.
WordPerfect 5.1 wasn't fancy. It didn't need to be. It gave a kid with a Tandy computer and a head full of stories a place to put them, and that's still what I'm doing today, just with better tools. That same Tandy actually shows up in another story I wrote, about where the word "geek" actually came from — turns out it's tangled up in this one too.