Technobiography

I was moved away from my extended family in New York when I was 6 weeks in order to allow my father getting a higher position with his high tech company called Symbol. We were relocated to California where my father worked for symbol helping to create and improve the scanners that are connected to computers at most retail stores, and allow a price to come up just by looking at the bar code.
As you can guess because my father was helping to create some up and coming technology we also had the up and coming technology so by the time I way about 5 years old we had a computer in my house and I was addicted to the "Put-Put" game with the little car that travels around. My dad has always been about building his own computers so he can update them as new additions to computers came out, so growing up I always had the special computer that ran faster and had more capabilities then my friends. Even by the age of 7 I knew how to use a computer and had to help my mother manage to use it for work. By the time I had reached 3rd grade we were using computers in the class room on a daily basis and would go to a computer lab to practice our typing every afternoon as part of our curriculum. I can't even remember not having a computer in my home or my school.
Like every other kid that I grew up with we all got cell phones before we went to high school and lab tops for college. This was the standard where I grew up. It wasn't until I lived in Hawaii for a year that I learned to really appreciate the technology I had. When people say that Hilo, Hawaii is 10 years behind in technology they really aren't joking with you. Our dorm rooms had dial-up internet and absolutely no tv from either cable or from the rabbit ear's antenna's. and all of our receipts for everything at school were hand written on carbon copy paper. For just about everything we needed to do in Hilo required going to an office, and dealing with people. Everything was a long process in Hawaii and anything that you needed to get done as far as paperwork was like going to the DMV with broken down printers. I do appreciate what I got from living in Hawaii however because just 2 years ago I had an experience with a low amount of technology and it only makes me appriciate it all the more now that I am back on the mainland and I don't take even a simple reciept for granted or even being able to purchase a permit online.