WHY I NOW OWN A COMPUTER?

Writen in april 1992.

It all started in 1992, by a bad trip to Florida.

We had rented, for three months, my wife Françoise and I, a nice little house on a canal in Hernando Beach, on the Gulf of Mexico. A dream place. The weather was exceptionnal and everything was beautiful, when my wife had to be rushed to hospital:

Infarctus.

She went through angioplasty and was hospitalized for 10 days.

Fortunately, she survived.

We would have liked to stay over for the duration of our planned trip but, we had to come back to Québec, because my father passed away suddenly, two days after my wife's hospitalization had terminated.

Coming back home in February, temperature very cold,

snow that doesn't stop snowing

and, Françoise who has to go back to the hospital for a second angioplasty. She was hospitalized for another two weeks.

Beeing all by myself in our house with almost nothing to do (I could see her only a few minutes every day in the intensive care unit) I can assure you that I was finding the place large ...and empty.

I asked myself:

«What can I do to fill my days?"

Why not write my souvenirs?»

That's when I decided to buy a computer so I could do word processing.

If only I had known.

And today, here I am, writing, while listening to music from my CDRom.

But, when I first started, it was Dos 5, Geoworks

(anybody knows what happened to it?)

And then, Windows 3.0

I was fast sold to the fact that I needed PcTools 5, 6, 7, 8, etc...Dos 6.0, 6.1, 6.2...Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and 98... I have to admit that I am fully satisfied with it, if I except the fact that it takes a lot of room on a hard disk and that it is very slow to charge.

And I installed Multi Media and a CDRom, one of the first one speed. Here in Québec, the only CDRom that was available, was the Grolier Encyclopedia, in English, and it was sold at Radio Shack on special order for about $650.00. I realized very fast that I had to get my CD's from the States where many titles were already available.

I also realised that 40 Megs for a hard disk was not the best. I added another one with 250 Megs. Then my motherboard was only a 386 and I only had 2 Megs of memory... So I traded my MB for a 386, 33 Megahertz and increased my memory to 8 Megs (16 or even 32 would certainly be more effective...) I also changed my 40 megs for a 1,2 gigabytes hard disk.

 

But I am sure that a Pentium 100 must work much faster than mine..And they are now talking about 150 and 200 Mhz, and what about MMX?. I know own a 166 mgh. a rewritable CD, 68 K memories and am looking forward to change my motherboard for a 350 or a 400 Mgh.

Something to dream about....

And it is with this computer that I am now writing this page.

I almost forgot the Internet...

I called CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, Aol, etc...,because there was no server in my region. But prices were out of this word... They were offering to connect for free with a 800 line, but you had to pay as much as $12.00 an hour to be able to communicate.

I tried Montréal, the local school board and about all the spots I could think of.

(I even checked to find out if it was possible to connect through satellite.)

I had to wait about a whole year before I could navigate.

I am browsing for a little over two years now.

I can now find my way in it. But what a mess. But also, what a source of informations.

And Québec is now discovering the pleasures of Internet and pretty soon, everybody will have his or her own site.

I feel like a pioneer, even if I remember that about 10 or 12 years ago, I knew people that were using Commodore. 64 K, they were telling me. All these terms were really Greek to me.

And now, I have my own site on the Web for almost a year, and I am translating it into English.