computer disks!

At some point in the late-80s our family procured a video camcorder. It was used sparingly throughout the years, but the one thing that was always recorded was when we were opening up presents. We have barely any videos of grandparents, vacations, everyday life, sports games, recitals, or just of funny stuff we would do as kids. But if you want to see a video of us opening up presents we have a veritable catalogue from December 1988 to December 2001 of every gift opening, birthday or Christmas.

I'm going to share with you two of mine and Stephen's greatest gift moments.

I remember the day when Dad bought a $2000 computer. It had a hard disk drive and 640KB of RAM. Its operating system was a DOS tree program. Anyways, one year I got a present that caused me to raise it over my head triumphantly and yell "COMPUTER DISKS!" This makes me smile because some of that excitement stays with me. I love playing old arcade games (especially PacMan) and I still love doodling around on computers. But anyways, the computer discs in my hand were actually a trifector of the biggest games shows in the 80s: Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and Family Feud. Do these pictures bring back any memories for anyone else?


Now for Stephen. Probably some of the coolest after-pictures of Christmas day were Stephen's incredible poses with his Hot Keyz key-tar. Does anyone else remember Hot Keyz? I was going to get a picture from Stephen's Facebook... BUT Stephen deleted his profile recently. So close. So if you're there Stephen, try to wrangle up some of your Hot Keyz pictures.

But anyways, the Hot Keyz (the 'z' is important) was awesome. In particular I remember that if you held one particular key down it would play the melody for "Born in the U.S.A."... except it wouldn't play the whole song. It would actually just play the melody for the singular line of "Born in the U.S.A."... just "dow dow dada dow dow dow... dow dow dada dow dow dow... dow dow dada dow dow dow". Then you could change the tempo and key. Totally awesome!