It's Saturday Night -
Time for more Genealogy Fun!
Our mission from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings
is to:
1) I am a slave to my computer - how about you? What is your computer
history - what have you used, when did you get it, what did you do on it, etc.?
Here's mine:
My first exposure to computers was in 6th grade (1966) when we took a field trip to a big business in San Francisco
and saw the big IBM computer. I think the business might have been
Wells Fargo Bank’s office building. For souvenirs, we each got a punch card to
take home.
In college, I was a bio major, but used a slide rule in chemistry
classes. Calculators were very expensive and I couldn’t afford one. In my
senior year, I took a programming class offered in the math department at Cal
State University, Hayward. The instructor taught us BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL.
Basically, he told us what to make the computer do, and how to do it in three
different languages. The small computer lab had terminals for us to use to
write the BASIC programs and punch card machines to write the FORTRAN programs.
I don’t know how the COBOL was done as I skipped that language. I wasn’t
planning on being a computer programmer or engineer. My friend, Bill, worked as an IBM repairman
and I just wanted a taste of programming.
Clearly, using the terminals was far superior to punching
cards. You immediately learned when trying to run the program what went wrong.
With the cards, you had to wait for the batch to run and then learn a few hours
later that it didn’t work, and have to start all over again.
I didn’t work with computers until I went to work for Alameda
Sporting Goods in 1977. They hired me to input data into their new-to-them
computer. It was an IBM computer (I don’t remember the model) that was a big as
a sofa. The salesman must have really done a sell job, as it was way more than
they needed for their business. It only lasted there a year and was sent back. By
then, I had gotten a job at BART as a train operator.
Shortly after working for BART, my friend Bill and I decided to get personal computers. These machines we built ourselves (I paid him to put the motherboard together as my soldering skills were non-existent) and ran on the CPM operating system with two 8-in floppy drives. Those were the days when you had to type in commands to get things done. It did run WordStar as a word processor, which I used to write stories and type papers on the daisy wheel printer. The whole things cost us $4000 and we even took out a small loan from the credit union. I loved that machine and wrote lots of stories and little programs in BASIC to keep track of things. There was one game on it called Adventure, a text-based treasure hunt.
I am a little fuzzy on when I first got a PC. I know it ran on DOS
and we still used WordStar as our word processing program. I also bought a used laptop
sometime in the 90s from a friend which was great to use for story writing
while on vacation. We once went camping and I had a converter for the car that
plugged into the cigarette lighter outlet to charge the battery in the
computer.
At BART, I later worked in the training department. At
first, there was only one computer. We would write up our lesson plans and hand
them to the clerk to type up. Later, they got a couple more machines and we
took turns keying in our own lesson plans. I had to learn WordPerfect. Luckily
the keystroke commands were the same, but still it was frustrating at first.
Then I learned how to really use the “reveal codes” function and fell in love
with WordPerfect. Of course, the good times didn’t last. The district switched
over to Microsoft products and I was forced to learn Word.
Also sometime in the 90s, I turned to genealogy as a hobby
and used PAF for my genealogy program. It was a DOS program and I followed the
recommendations of the Silicon Valley PAF Users Group guidelines for entering
data in PAF. In those days, sources were entered in the Notes field. Once I
could access the Internet, I found genealogy information mostly from USGENWeb
and RootsWeb. I wrote letters the old-school way and sent out lots of queries.
Boy, I loved returning home from work and finding the SASEs in my mailbox.
It wasn’t until I decided to write a book in the mid-2000s about
my husband’s Swedish ancestors that I purchased an Ancestry account, which I
have used since. At one point after hearing Geoff Rasmussen give a talk, that I
switched to Legacy Family Tree software and used it for many years, until
Elizabeth Shown Mills wrote about how she used RootsMagic and I made my last
switch. I have been using it since. All of my data is stored in RootsMagic and
only a basic tree is on Ancestry to help with DNA matching.
Today, I have a year-old ThinkPad laptop running Win10 with
a second monitor. I have another laptop running XP that works best with my
flatbed scanner and also has my only copy of InDesign4. Each time I turn it on,
I say a prayer that it will keep working. I set it so it doesn’t connect to the
Wi-Fi anymore since the virus software is out of date. I use Ancestry,
FamilySearch, Newspaper.com, and Find-a-Grave primarily but also seek out
sources at Google Books, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust, and make trips to
local and faraway archives, libraries, and courthouses. I write at least three
blog posts a week on one of my two blogs: My Trails into the Past and Mam-ma’s
Southern Family. I hope to use my computer to write as many stories as I can
about my children’s ancestors.
Like Randy, you are a very techie person, Lisa. And, you started early learning about computers. My experience was a bit different through the years - much less mathematically and scientifically inclined.
ReplyDeleteBecause in my early days, I was a fiction writer, I found the use of computers extremely helpful in editing one's work.
DeleteI'm impressed how early you were exposed to computers and how early you began using them. I feel like a piker in comparison. But all that experience sure has helped you in genealogy.
ReplyDeleteI recognized early what a great resource they are!
Delete