I was your typical girl with a diary. I used to stack journals as a hobby, scribbling about anything that came to mind. As early as I can remember, I was extremely creative and imaginative. There were many characters I used to play, from the girl who's saving the world to the genius mastermind in an adventure film. I was always soaking up the world and eager to think bigger than I was.
On hot summer days when school was over, I didn’t have much growing up. I was in the awkward digital age where Nintendo was hitting the shelves and the internet was booming, but I still touched grass as a kid. During the day, I was playing kickball with the neighbourhood kids, and at night, I was surfing the web, playing Penguins, and instant messaging on AOL. It was a unique time to be alive. Who knew a box connected to a phone as dial-up would change my life forever and everyone else’s in the world.
Even better during that time, my dad used to work at a junkyard where people used to trash their old electronics. He would describe the landfill higher than the ceiling, and at that time, that was super tall for me. There were no solutions yet for recycling broken and unused electronics. My brothers and I were always so excited for him to come home. He would roll up with his baby blue 1990’s Chevy with electronics he picked up from the junkyard. We wouldn’t even wait for him to get out of his car and would jump in the back to see what he has collected.
It was crazy the amount of things people threw out: clocks, watches, TVs, remotes, consoles, and our favorite…computers! Of course, all these electronics were broken, missing pieces, and completely damaged. My dad tried to bring reasonable condition pieces, but to be easy on him, none of these items were expected to work. This is how we got our first computer. It was powered by Windows and heavy as a brick.
My brothers and I were as young as 8 to 12 years old, but we were so dedicated to making this cube work. For some miraculous reason, we pressed the ON button, and the screen began to function. A loading sign popped up.
By this time, we understood we had to wait until the loading was completed. I give thanks to all the endless nights playing Mario and Pokémon. This was the time we waited to test our technical skills. We all rejoiced with delight when we made it to the homepage. I’ve always wondered who could throw out a perfectly usable computer? We dug through the files to see what was there. My brother handled the cursor, and I couldn’t keep up with the movement. Our keyboard was missing a few keys. I still don’t remember how we managed to make it through all the programs.
This was a revolutionary moment for us kids. Our computer was functioning with a few tweaks here and there. We found files from a guy named Bob or Tom. I don’t exactly remember, but it was somewhere aligned with those names. The main thing was we didn’t know that our world was opening up. That the little diary of mine was going to exist somewhere online, someday.