I got my first job in the summer of 1983 programming databases for the local school district. Except I didn’t know they were called databases, or that you needed a whole plan to make them.

That didn’t stop me (or two other classmates that were hired that summer to track migrant students in the schools), and we banged out some code using TRS-80 Model IVs and played aroung with a Xenix server that no one knew what to do with.

When it was all said and done I used my paycheck to buy my first home computer, a Commodore 64. Also got to catch a few movies, including “WarGames,” my (generation’s) introduction to hacking and artificial intelligence. The machines used in the film, the phone modems, the graphics, the sounds…

I’d have to watch the film again to make a list of everything we thought we knew back then, as well as everything that turned out to be true. Yeah, that would be fun.

First time posting anything in a while… actually, saving the post locally and sneaking it into Github?

I have the habit of not changing the station, or the tape, or the CD, or the playlist that I listen to and I end up listening to the same album for months on end. Whether it be auto search, or song skip or whatever, I burn a song in my head until I get sick of it. As of late, I find that if I come across any of these songs, I’ll “feel” the time it was burned in my chemistry. It’s not always good. But it’s always interesting.

1980? We got cable, and HBO. Before MTV, the Music Breaks provided my first exposure to music videos

1982-83 Tuning the radio away from my parents’ stations

There was this time we got an FM antenna and I heard this song in stereo on the old console:

1984 Summer-school biology, with the Oz.

Although my formative years took place in the 1980s, the 90s were a force to be reckoned with, once I started to pay attention. That being said, the close of the decade brought a seal to the era in an unusual way: a commercial on television, featuring a song from the 1970s.

There’s many an explanation as to why this is a defining moment in my 90s decade, but to be sure it was the boom of the internet, and how listening to an unknown song that hocked a product that I wasn’t going to purchase led to an online search that brought an (almost) immediate response.

I hope I never tire of this tune.

(Somehow rearranged.) And it happened driving somewhere in somebody’s car, that the radio played the M/A/R/R/S mashup “Pump Up the Volume,” and music changed forever, all at once.

NOTE TO SELF: “… and then all things changed, somehow rearranged” are the lyrics I remember from the early 1980s HBO show “Remember When.” Dick Cavett hosted the series, which took on a topic and explored it for an hour, very much in the same way modern documentaries are done today, taking one topic, then exploring all branches that lead from it. The theme song: