Ominous Velour

My first computer was one of these bad boys. The beautiful Amiga 500. I got it for my 7th birthday, and it lived for just long enough to outlast its warranty and not a moment longer.

In the grand scene of things, it was pretty unremarkable (though probably a wildly outlandish birthday present for the 7-year-old daughter of a working-class single mom in the 80s) but it sparked a love of computers and technology that lives on within me to this day.

From the day I got this baby until today, I’ve never not had a computer. I’ve built several of my own, including baby’s first Linux box when I was 15. I started chatting with strangers online before it was cool (and, really, before it was online) on multi-line BBSes in the very early 90s.

I went to trade school for computers as a 16-year-old, and was both the only female and the only under-25 in my class. If you’ve never had the fun of student-teaching men who are simultaneously double your age and terrified of making you cry, you haven’t lived.

Now here I am, way too many years later, still working in tech, though more in the applications end of things than hardware these days, having received the dubious “honor” of being recently dubbed my team’s Sharepoint expert. So I guess one ridiculous birthday present really set the path for my whole life from then to now.