[GeorgiaMa'am]

My first computer memory is excitedly going to my uncle's office with him in the middle of the night. "I think I found another one!" he said, I recall. We were going to play Adventure on his gigantic office computer, a RPG that was completely text based - no graphics, just white ASCII characters on a black screen. It required a 5-1/4" floppy disk, and took forever to boot up. The people at the electric company where he worked were really excited over it; there was a giant, hand-drawn map on the wall over the computer, showing the parts of the maze that had been uncovered so far. This is also my first beloved memory of gaming addiction. I was about 12, so this was in the late 70s. That would have made it several years in advance of the actual internet.

In college I had a student email account, and a little exposure to BBSes. I didn't have much interest in the internet until I managed to get my own computer, around the early 1990s. I started out with Compuserve, and joined a forum for pagans. We had full moon rituals online in chat, which worked in some ways and others not so much. The first time I was in charge of part of the ritual, I typed out my part in notepad in advance, planning to copy and paste it into chat one line at a time. I had never tried this previously, and did not discover until too late that I couldn't paste into CS's chat. Furiously switching from window to window, I hastily tried to type it all quickly ... I occasionally still think of our attempts to invoke the God and Goddess electronically. Probably by now, there is an app for that.