I opened a random file on a hard drive I use to store archived files just for the fun of it. I discovered a draft of a piece written about 10 years ago; it contained this account of my entry into computing:
As an undergraduate science education major, I concluded that computers were certainly a part of my future. I purchased my first computer and enrolled in my first computer course. The machines we had in the education computer lab and the one I had at home were comparable: Apple II’s (I had the “portable” Apple II c model at home, whereas we used the desktop Apple II e model in the computer room at the University of Vermont). The machines had 128 kilobytes of memory. To launch an application, on these computers, one had to put the 5.25-inch floppy diskette that contained the program into the drive and then start the computer. To launch another application, one changed the disk and rebooted the computer. Data was saved on separate disks of the same size, and to double our storage space, you would punch a hole in the side of the disk and put the disk in the drive upside down.