By: Melanie Rush25th Oct 2024 8:20PMSomewhere in the mid-1980s Dad came home from work one day with a Commodore 64. We plugged the keyboard into the small kitchen TV and a family friend lent us a cassette deck so my brother and I (both aged under 10) could play computer games. He also lent us a dot-matrix printer for a few weeks.

I remember a single computer at Bundamba Primary, a Macintosh, and the whole class gathering around it to watch a "turtle" move around the screen. In grade 8, at Ipswich Girls' Grammar School, there was still a Computer Studies classroom full of the Macs. That year (1993) we all had to do a "keyboard skills" subject, where we had to develop our typing skills. In grade 9, I did Computer Studies as an elective and we learnt about "the internet" and did an assignment speculating on the future of computers. The following year, Windows 95 was launched and that really did change everything.

Dad would bring his brick-like laptop home from work so I could type assignments in year 11 and 12. After the laptop overheated one day (and Dad's attempts to cool it down in the freezer failed), we got our first home computer in September of 1997. At that time, only one other friend from school had a computer connected to the internet at home and an email address. Our internet service provided was GIL - Global Information Links.

In 1998, my first year at Uni, I remember having to call my mother at work whenever I was going on the internet (she was a worrier), to let her know the home landline would be out of order for an hour or so. As websites started getting more graphics, and we remained on dial-up, I recall having to keep track of the family's data usage, recording daily totals on a notepad, so we could ration access as the month neared its end and internet speeds would drop to a snail's pace. Everything was done on floppy disks and assignments still had to be printed and submitted in hard-copy.

My first year of Uni was also when I got my first mobile phone. Dad's work had installed a car phone into his car in the early 1990s (he also had a pager and a Blackberry)and Mum got a mobile phone for work in the mid-1990s. We could make phone calls and that was it. Text messages had to wait a couple of years, until we got Nokia 5110s.