Finally My Own Place

Of course, they talk about having a place of one's own, but in reality, many of us never do have a place of our own. We go from our parents' house to the house or apartment we share with a roommate perhaps and then to one we share with a spouse. We may have our own bedroom or our own office at home or work, but it's still not the same as having a place of our very own. It occurs to me that even though I live alone now that my husband died, I still live in a space that houses his presence. Certainly, I don't mind that. In fact, I am not prepared to leave it at this point. But my studio is my first space of my very own. And I love the feeling. I can furnish it however I want, arrange my tools and supplies where I want, determine the wall color, the flooring material, the color of the furniture, where I want the lights, where I will hang my beads and the jewelry I make.

It's like that first little computer I had that was all my own. I had my own computer at work, and I borrowed my brother's computer while he was away, but it was when I finally got that little Mac Classic that I knew what the term "personal computer" meant. In those days, the late 80's and early 90's, the term personal computer or PC referred to the text based IBM compatible computer. The term Mac referred to the graphics based Apple Macintosh line of computers.

I chose the Mac Classic as my own first computer because I wanted to learn something new. I already used the PC at work and was well familiar with it, including the DOS operating system. I understood how the hierarchy of directories and files worked and how to manipulate DOS to perform various tasks, including how to change the font size that printed out. Now I wanted to learn the Mac operating system. There were some Mac's in the computer lab of the community college where I was taking classes, so I had some familiarity with them, but I learned more on my own, just by fiddling with the computer and trying various operations.

That little Macintosh computer weighed 25 pounds and the whole computer was in one little case, the processing unit on the bottom and the monitor up above. The monitor was only about 7 inches square, but the resolution was so high that there was no problem with the small size. And since the monitor was located on top of the CPU, it was at just about eye level. It was a black and white monitor, but the text was black on a white screen, more like a piece of paper. It was possible to name the hard drive and hence the computer itself. This was for the purposes of networking. I called mine Max. I kept Max all spruced up with different "wallpaper" every week, and my directories with humorous names. In those days, DOS on ly allowed you to name directories and files with eight-letter titles. But even then the Mac allowed for long, descriptive titles.

It turns out the idea of buying and learning a Mac was an excellent one. By learning the Mac, I then understood the concept of Windows. Funny how winding slowly down one pathway will then enable you to progress quickly down another street. Learning something new is never a waste of time.