Games, E-mail, and Google

My earliest memories of the old computers consist of two things: Video games, and E-mail.

My preschool and elementary classrooms each had two PCs, which both looked a little older than the one pictured on the right. We had the Magic School Bus games, like "Magic School Bus Lands on Mars," and a few Jump Start games. Both of these video game series were targeted as educational, and I continued playing the Jump Start games until 6th grade. At home, I played Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, some Winnie the Pooh Bear and miscellaneous Disney games, and some random cereal box games.

All game play tended to involve interactive screens that you would click on, causing things to happen. The puzzle portions had moving animation, but certainly it was not like the graphics of today.

Here's a video of the beginning of Jump Start Third Grade, to give you an idea of these games' graphics:

As much as I loved them then, I am too accustomed to the fast-paced graphics of today to even tolerate playing these games-- they seem so slow and boring. My little brothers are growing up on the Lego Star Wars games and Skylanders, and have little to no patience for games like Jump Start.

Something I do still use? E-mail. However, I used it in the AOL subscription area-- it was slow and awful, but I could talk with my friends without actually talking (cue the invention of texting). That cute boy that I liked? Totally chatted with him about teachers and video games and stuffed animals. However, it was so slow that it was hardly worth my time to use frequently.

Now I can access a whole slew of different E-mail providers, and don't have to go through America Online to do it.


But what about the internet access itself? To me, Google was just there... My first research paper was in 3rd grade, and I don't remember being surprised about or confused on how to use Google (I typed in "hamster" and got pictures of hamsters), so clearly it seemed a no-brainer to me. Google was the internet to me-- if asked, I would have said that Google stored all of the websites inside of it (whatever "it" was, I couldn't have said). I didn't realize that the internet was created until much later on in life-- life without it seemed silly and archaic.

These advancements in both graphics, speed, and content seem to be breeding these Internet-literate generations, and the Internet is becoming inseparable from most people's daily lives.