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MaryLou White
Founder PIRC Network,
PIRC Bulletin Board, PIRC Beginners Workshop and
Honourary Member of PhotoImpact International
Way back in the 60's, I discovered computers. They
were fascinating things in huge rooms with raised floors and all
kinds of machines surrounding them. Each of those machines had their
own sound and when everything was in motion, it was like a small
orchestra playing. That's when I decided my college major had to
be in the computer field and I became a programmer.
There were advancements over the years and at Atari, (My favorite
place to work), I was a senior programmer analyst. In the early
80's, I wanted a PC - an 8086 - and decided to be brave and build
my own. I bought a book that told about the various parts and what
was needed and a week later, I anxiously turned on the switch and
was so excited when up came the C: prompt! Well, that meant having
to learn DOS! I LOVED DOS! It was yet another programming language
to add to my growing list. Over the years, I learned to use many
programs such as WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Quatro Pro, and was even
a beta tester for some major companies.
1985 - Above are two of my computer
systems taken in 1985.
You can see I have two systems, each one has 3 floppy drives
(they didn't have hard drives yet) and there are two printers.
I became interested in graphics way
back before printers were capable of printing graphics. An image
had to be created using only the letters on the keyboard such as
X and O. I'm sure you've seen some of those old pictures, they were
pretty awesome back then! The printer makers finally came out with
a chip that would let you upgrade your printer to print graphics
and a few companies started making programs that did a whopping
16 color printouts!
Everything was square and blocky looking but it was still pretty
incredible. When I started my own Bulletin Board in 1984, it was
called Wishing Well and it had four telephone lines. People logged
in from all over the United States.
1987 - MaryLou's Atari 800, and
800XL, an Atari 400,
an Apple, and her 8086
My board (called a BBS back then), was run on a
separate computer from my family room and offered chat, messages,
games, forums, uploads and downloads. It was pretty exciting to
see people logging in and doing the available activities.
Graphics were a large part of the board but back then and the only
thing available was ANSI graphics. It was a challenge to make things
exciting with only 16 colors to play with, but we did! Wishing Well
was on-line until 1994 (10 years) when I decided the internet was
the way of the future so, I bid everyone farewell and took it off-line.
I really missed it for a while, the sounds of people logging in
or the "boing" from a game when someone earned a point but as the
internet grew, my interests grew with it.
1986 This is me on the cover of
a Ziff-Davis
computer magazine. Was taken in 1986 when they
were just starting to do things with computer graphics.
This was so amazing! They took the picture and about 5
minutes later, it came out of the computer. The
graphics are very blocky but we were in total awe!
This was new technology!
The first thing that piqued my interest were web
pages. How on earth do they do that? There were very few tutorials
and no books but it intrigued me and I wanted to know how it was
done. I got a web site at Geocities which was then called Geo Pages
and it had a very limited editor but I learned how to view the source
of a page and realized it was just simple coding! With my programming
background, it was very easy to see the patterns and how things
went together. Within a few weeks, I got my own domain and started
coding my web pages. They didn't have things like Dreamweaver and
FrontPage back then. It was use Notepad or do without.
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Vintage Wishing Well Site Award
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