My Experiences with New Technology

I was fortunate enough to be exposed to the world of computers from a very early age. My father brought home our first computer from work. It was an IBM with DOS. Nothing like sticking in a disk and rebooting to start a program! I can vaguely remember my father booting up a few games and letting me play them. Within a few days, I was begging him to tell me how to start them on my own so I could play whenever I wanted. I was about 5 years old at the time, so I had some basic reading skills. It was enough to let me learn a few simple DOS commands and get started. I even remember playing some text adventures with my brother, though I could scarcely tell what was going on at the time. I’ve been hooked on computers ever since.

Through the years, most of my computer knowledge has been self-taught. With a few exceptions, computers are very forgiving to trial and error and I have always been content to poke around things myself until I figure things out. I also constantly find myself pushing my limits and trying new software and sometimes even a new programming language. This could prove to be both an advantage and a disadvantage to empathizing with users who are not familiar with technology. On one hand, constantly trying new things keeps me reminded of how unintuitive software can be at times and how frustrating it can be when things don’t work like you expect them to. On the other, being fairly self-sufficient, I might have a harder time empathizing with users that can’t work through their problems themselves.