Write about your first computer.
As an Xennial who grew up on a farm in rural Wisconsin, a computer wasn’t exactly a high priority in my upbringing.
I never like writing about “back in my day,” but it’s truly absurd to me, and perfectly encapsulates to Xennial experience, that I grew up spinning the dial on a wall phone and now I’m typing a blog post about it on a cell phone.
My first real computer that I got real use from was a hand-me-down from my sister in my third year of college.
I don’t remember the brand. It ran Windows 95 and came with a dot matrix printer. I never bothered with the printer, and instead saved my papers to a floppy disk and printed them out using my college computer lab’s laser printers.
All of it, from the PC to the printer to the giant fat back monitor was slow, clunky, and the greatest technological marvel I’d ever personally owned.
I sometimes wonder, when I drive through my old college campus, if they still have that one hall used primarily as the school’s computer lab, with rows and rows of computers for student use, all inside a building only accessible with a student ID.
I imagine that building has been repurposed by now… just another remnant of a time when college students had to get to the lab as early as possible during the last few weeks of the semester or risk having to sit and wait for someone to leave.
Travis Bille 
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