LA-LA-LIBRARIES:

My Technology Literacy Narrative begins at the young age 6 at the turn of the new century. 1999, the year of Intel Celeron, the Blackberry, and the life changing Mac OS X. I am the youngest of three, I have an older sister named Michelle and my Irish twin brother who goes by John. Irish twins in the sense that we were born only eleven months and twenty-three days apart, my siblings and I are not Irish, nor one bit.

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Weekends were what I looked forward to, the four stories of rooms lined with bookshelves. The Downtown Orlando library was, at the time, one of the only building in the area with a fully functional basement. Yet even better than that, they had a full range of MAC OS X computers with the clear backs in all the different colors that it came in. My favorite was always the one with the teal back. My siblings and I would spend hours checking out the educational computer games and floppy disks and wait as the computer loaded the disk to launch the software. I remember when computers where a closed server because having access to the internet required downloading the internet onto your computer from a disk and then plugging the ethernet cable into the phone jack. I miss the ever so classic sound of the DSL loading for one to use, it sounded like a robot from the Jetson’s having a meltdown.

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At the library however, the computers did not have internet connection that year, so most of what I could do on them required loading the disk into the port and waiting an average of fifteen minutes to click the launch button that would appear at the bottom right corner of the screen. I remember the keyboards at the time. They were also clear but frosted just enough for the plastic to have a tint to it that matched the color of the back of the computer.

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I will be honest and say that most of the time I did find myself giving up on the computers because they were rather tedious to operate and the books on the shelves were always friendly, simple, and they filled me with thoughts and ideas as I imagined the words on the pages come to life.