The Blinking Cursor That Changed My Life
The smallest signal can become the line between the life you planned and the life that finds you
I don’t remember every birthday present I ever received. Yet, I will never forget this one.
It was 1984, and I was gifted an Apple IIc computer.
Now, if you’re under forty, let me save you a trip to Google.
This thing wasn’t sleek. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t portable.
It looked like somebody had crossed a television with a filing cabinet and then dared a twelve-year-old to carry it across the room.
I loved it immediately. When I turned it on, there wasn’t a welcome screen.
No icons. No Internet. No helpful little paperclip asking if I needed assistance.
Just a blinking green cursor.
Looking back, that may have been one of the kindest introductions I have ever had.
Because that cursor never judged me.
That mattered more than I understood at the time.
You see, I spent most of my childhood convinced I was allergic to numbers.
Not bad at them. Allergic.
I didn’t even like holding cash because somebody might ask me to count it.
Math and I had an agreement. It was a little like unexpectedly meeting a rattlesnake on a South Texas ranch. You didn’t mess with it, and it wouldn’t mess with you.
At least that was my strategy. I eventually attended five different high schools trying to stay one chapter ahead of algebra.
Turns out algebra had my forwarding address.
Every new school looked at my transcript, smiled kindly, and assured my parents I was just a little behind because I was adjusting.
Bless their hearts.
By my senior year, somebody finally realized I had never made it past middle school pre-algebra.
Ironically, that was the first math problem anybody around me had solved correctly.
Years later, I learned I have dyscalculia, the numerical cousin of dyslexia.
Suddenly my childhood made sense. I hadn’t been lazy. I hadn’t been stupid. My brain simply spoke a different language. The funny thing is, that blinking cursor didn’t care about any of that.
It didn’t know my report card. It didn’t know I was terrified of numbers.
It didn’t know one teacher looked at me and said, “You’re a pretty girl. You’ll get married and raise children.”
It just blinked.
Patiently.
Like it had all the time in the world.
So I started asking questions.
I organized grocery orders for offshore work boats.
I categorized horse grain from the local feed store.
I journaled. I made lists.
Mostly, I wondered.
“I wonder what else this thing can do?”
Looking back, I wasn’t learning computers.
I was learning curiosity.
And here’s what took me forty years to understand.
Confidence wasn’t what got me started. Curiosity was.
Confidence has terrible timing.
It almost always shows up after you’ve embarrassed yourself a few times, asked the dumb questions, and survived long enough to realize nobody was keeping score.
Curiosity is the one that gets out of the chair.
Confidence usually wanders in later acting like it had the idea all along.
A little more than a decade after that Christmas morning, Forbes called me the Queen of the Internet.
People love that part of the story.
I do too.
But they usually miss the important part.
The Queen of the Internet wasn’t born the day Forbes printed the headline.
She was born the day a twelve-year-old girl sat down in front of a blinking green cursor that never made her feel stupid.
Forty-three years later, another blinking cursor appeared on my screen.
Only this one answered back.
I smiled.
Not because I understood artificial intelligence.
Because I recognized an old friend.
Turns out curiosity still speaks the same language.
I’ve been building something for the past several months called AI Without Intimidation™.
Not because I think everyone needs to become an AI expert.
Quite the opposite.
I think everybody deserves to feel at ease with AI.
Especially the smart, capable people who have quietly convinced themselves they’re “not good with technology.”
I know that story. I told myself one just like it myself.
Maybe you’ve never been behind. Maybe you’ve just been waiting for someone to explain it in a language that feels like home.
Pull up a chair.
We’re just getting started.
Kristi
