Computers – A Senior’s Journey

Being In my mid-80’s, I was born in the age of the abacus.  Processors (UNIVAC comes to mind) needed whole rooms, special ventilation, etc., all the while having considerably less computing power than today’s cellphones, or, for that matter, with most calculators.  My first brush with the big ones was in a course in grad school.  We were to have the computer analyze data from a chemical kinetics experiment.  We had to type stuff onto individual cards, which were sorted and loaded into the device.  Every card had to be totally correct, or the whole exercise would be aborted.  For someone like me, no way!

Fast forward a couple of decades.  I needed to enter data from real stuff, on cocaine potency, or some such, into a PC, a Leading Edge processor (remember those?).  This thing had a core memory of 512 kilobytes: Imagine that! 

At this point, I need to get technical.  A byte is a measure of data.  1,000 of these equal a kilobyte (or something like that).  Sort of metric system lingo.  1,000 kilobytes equal a megabyte.  1,000 megabytes amount to a gigabyte.  At this point, we’ve about entered the 21st Century.  A couple of decades into it, we’re talking terabytes (1,000 gigabytes), with, seemingly, no end in sight.

Near the end of the last century, I retired from civil service and got a (real) job teaching high school and college chem.  Since I no longer had access to the powerful Leading Edge gizmo, I had a neighborhood kid build me one.  It had 512 kilobytes! State of the art! On my first Open School night (1994) I asked for a show of hands of people who had Internet access at home.  About 10% did.  The following year: About 30%.  By the fourth year, about everybody.  This was, of course, a Catholic high school in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Washington, DC area.

I tried getting my students to process data they had acquired in chem lab, with mixed success, at best. The process was much easier than my experience in  grad school.  We entered data, for example, on a keyboard directly into a PC.  I also got them to do Internet searches.  I tried to impress on them that just because the Internet said something, it was not an excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount.  For example, kids, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws website is not an unbiased, objective source on pot legalization.  How much simpler it  was to teach in those days!

Unfortunately, fifteen years after retirement, I find myself falling further and further from the mainstream, so to speak.  We recently had to bid farewell to a 10-year old laptop.   Our son bought us a replacement, which turned out to be a tablet.  I still haven’t been able to get it to talk to my printer.  I have learned a few things, however.  Seems tablets are designed to work better with the cloud.  The what???