No one in my immediate family had any talent for making music. I recall a record player in a big blond cabinet, a Motorola I think, and a small collection of 78 rpm records. So there was some music in hearing distance from that as well from the radio and tv. There was some mandatory musical exposure in school, but can I only really remember enjoying a few elementary school folk songs. One of my worst memories from my junior high school days was being required to stand up in front of the class and sing something. I would have gladly traded that experience for a bout of corporal punishment.
Over the years my musical indifference and illiteracy was punctured occasionally by largely accidental encounters with musical expression which I found pleasing. I eventually developed a liking for classical guitar and even took a few guitar lessons. That went nowhere due to a lack of any sense of rhythm. Later, I found some affinity with some of the great jazz vocalists, mostly from '30s and '40s, and I also liked most chamber music I came across.
Luckily, music seems to have a genetic component which makes musical enjoyment accessible to even someone like me with a tin ear, and there were even a few instances in which musical performances became associated with life changing events. One such experience was the result of my immersion in the developing world of personal computers in the early 1990s.
We were living in southern New Mexico by then and I worked in a series of jobs in several social services agencies. While working for a newly established guardianship group I developed a Foxpro/dBase program for recording visit notes along with billing information. I got some free surplus computers from White Sands which I set up for our Las Cruces office and trained the staff in their use, and I also did some consulting and training with other social service agencies around the state.
The database application I developed relied on the text-based MS-DOS operating system, but it had easily maneuvered menus which made it quick to learn and easy to use. I tried MicroSoft's early Windows system which was trying to compete with Apple's graphical user interface, but it just seemed awkward and ugly and did not tempt me at all to move my database programing in that direction.
What took me in a completely new direction in social services computer applications was the appearance of Windows 95. I was working at that point in staff training in a agency providing services for mentally disabled adults. We used personal computers extensively in preparing training materials and I was often called on to do hardware and software trouble shooting. I think most of the agency's computers were still stuck in Windows 3.1 at the time.
Windows 95 and its graphical user interface was a huge improvement over Windows 3, not only in speed and ease of use, but also in its networking capabilities which meshed nicely with the availability of a whole new world of information through the World Wide Web. What really got my attention on the Windows 95 installation disk, though, was a short music video which featured Edie Brickell singing Good Times.
There was no novelty in music videos in general by 1995; they were inescapable on tv. Somehow, though, being able to summon up a fully animated musical performance on a computer screen seemed revolutionary. I recall inserting the Win 95 disk in a computer in our little three person office and seeing my coworkers' eyes light up as they watched Good Times. It was a short step from there to installing network adapters and wiring our computers together for file sharing and telephone line access to the World Wide Web.
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There is a nicely produced YouTube emulation of playing the Good Times video on the Win 95 screen.
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