MY FIRST COMPUTER

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy
President and CEO The Commonwealth Club of California

My first desktop computer (1982) was put together by San Francisco engineer and philanthropist Henry Dakin, who has helped many people in the nonprofit sector become computer functional. It consisted of a custom DOS-based computer, two eight-inch Shugart floppy drives, a big black and white CRT, and a dot-matrix printer. My first husband was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News, and the Merc outfitted its staff with TRS-80 laptops to cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. I looked at his TRS-80 and said, “That’s neat!” And got one for myself.