life with computer

( Image available via Wikimedia Commons. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Macintosh_128k_transparency.png/511px-Macintosh_128k_transparency.png )


Those of us who are part of the generations that experienced both 'life before computer' and 'life with computer' probably can come up with what got us initially hooked. For the general population, we're probably talking about the early 1980s here.

For some, it was a way of organizing office information, managing accounts, drafting documents, maps, and blueprints. For many, it may well have been the access to fascinating, stimulating, funny or adventurous games. (Before internet, you bought the software on floppy discs and manually loaded it to the machine.) For me, the main draw was the beautiful experience of using a word processor. It was awkward being a writer with terrible handwriting. Now, with my cube shaped Mac, I could clearly read what I wrote, and edit as I went. That experience was an enormous gift. (You don't know how bad my penmanship is!) The quality of my writing, the pace, and the quantity of finished product (such as poems, reports, short stories) skyrocketed. Although those first years I had no access to internet, I spent hours working at my computer, an invaluable tool.

As internet became available, the pleasure of emailing, of being able to receive and send work documents and messages to friends without delays, was a tremendous lure.* Then, as the internet expanded, companies came up with ways to sell products online. As more and more companies provided this service, and as ways to actually make financial transactions on the computer became available, the resistance to using a computer broke down among the masses, and it became an assumption that everyone had access to online information and activity.

Well, maybe it wasn't exactly like this, but from my perspective, and as my memory permits, this is how I experienced the rapid first stages of what has been both a great and, in some ways, a catastrophic, societal transition.



* (This was supposed to ease our consumption of paper products. Unfortunately, as printers became standard equipment - not only with office and personal computers, but with things like computerized cash registers and gasoline pumps - consumption of paper per capita has increased enormously.)