April 2020 marks the twentieth anniversary of my family's first steps into the Information Age. Though I can't remember the exact date offhand, it was a Sunday in late April 2000 when we piled into the car and headed to the Gateway Computers outlet in Orland Park. About the only thing I remember of the exact location is that it was close to the Barnes and Noble bookstore. What's throwing me off twenty years later is that I distinctly remember B&N sharing space on the outside of the silo with Gateway. Also, I almost never head out that way!
As the words were flying off my fingers, my mind's eye was going, "Did Gateway have the lower part of the silo, or did B&N have the whole thing and Gateway was somewhere else?" Thankfully, I can pull off a conjuring trick with the magic of Google Street View!
Aha! That's what was throwing me off! See where I've circled, that dinky little clothing store called "Justice"? As soon as I pulled that up, it occurred to me that I could run about four feet from Gateway to B&N. But there is another possibility, which I will elucidate below.
Notice how Nordstrom Rack cuts into and throws off the symmetry of Bed Bath & Beyond? The elongated arch of the central store is intended to be the centerpiece of this part of the shopping center, with the overall shape in full view. Dear readers, I will bet you, solely on my conjecture, that Nordstrom Rack occupies the space that one or two narrower outlets once occupied....and that's where Gateway once stood. Of course, as they say, "the memory cheats."
The better part of a month passed, and the school year wound to a close. Some time in May, we went on the class trip to Springfield, Illinois' capitol. I remember...very little of it, but somewhere along the line, I bought this mouse-pad featuring the Declaration of Independence--still use it, in fact, but, after twenty years, the foam rubber on the bottom is crumbling away.
Come to think of it, I might have bought it in the gift shop at Abraham Lincoln's birthplace.
We arrived back at Central Junior High at around..........ooh, six o'clock at night, having driven through a dreadful storm all the way through. When Mom brought me home, the whole thing was set up and ready to go. The first game I loaded into it and played was the 1998 edition of Wheel of Fortune, because we used to have, ten years before the Gateway, an ancient, steam-driven, possibly coal-fired Hewlett-Packard one, loaded with, among other things, a host of games, one of which was Wheel of Fortune. Therefore it seemed only right that Wheel should usher in this new day.
Acknowledgments and thanks to Lazy Gaming Reviews
It came with two software bundles. The first included then-current encyclopedias and atlases, Broderbund's Print Shop Pro, Word, Works Suite, the lot. Unfortunately, I never got around to actually using most of it, mainly because grade school works wonders at killing one's love of learning, and seventh grade is especially good at putting the final nail into its coffin.
The second set--ah! The second was the games. Microsoft Flight Simulator; Jeopardy!; Microsoft Puzzle Collection; Pinball Arcade (no, not FarSight's Pinball Arcade); Clue; Sorry!; The Game of Life; Revenge of Arcade; Scrabble; a Small Soldiers game; and The Neverhood, a now exceedingly-rare Claymation game. Pinball Arcade and Revenge of Arcade...
And there was America Online. Yes, I belong to the generation for whom the 'Net sounded like this (thanks to Willterminus):
Ah, the olden days of HTML-based websites and games in Java and Shockwave. The two sites I visited most often for games were Alfy.com and the old Wonka website.
Videos in Apple QuickTime and RealPlayer, the old AskJeeves search engine, using Netscape at school, playing the Stock Market Game in eighth grade...oh, it was a time for the World Wide Web!
The old Gateway rig served us about five or six years. Of course you know, with access to the Internet comes the threat of malware, spyware, and viruses. Who knows how much of what flotsam and jetsam it picked up in those years?
In 2006, it got so slow and so noisy that we had to replace it with several other models from Computer Greeks. There was a big green one; a red one; a silver HP...all went the same way after several years of service each. Each was a learning experience, and I am now much more careful with what I download.
By this point, you're probably wondering why he's wittering on about a twenty-year-old computer that he no longer owns. Well, if we didn't buy that thing then, you might not be logging on to the Museum in the present day, and, since we bought it in 2000, then it ties in with the New Millennium theme. What's more, the way things have been going...gives me pause to re-evaluate those days and try to find the good in a few of them, and getting to write about them now is freeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment