A couple weeks ago I blogged about life in the Sixties and mentioned that computers were in existence, but housed in temperature controlled rooms and took up a great deal of space.
This made me wonder how our lives have changed since computers have become commonplace. I attended high school in the late 70’s and remember a small group of students were selected to take a “computer class” which turned out to be a programming class.I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I didn’t see another computer until my first office job in the early 80’s. The insurance company I worked for used computers to store information about a policy holder and generate whole life dividend charts based on a potential client’s age and gender.
They were printed out on dot-matrix tractor feed printers (the kind with the holes and perforated edges). Today computers can be traced to every aspect of life.I write on a computer, send and receive email, check my bank balance, schedule appointments with an online calendar, shop online, put books on hold at the library, do research, play a game of solitaire, store my digital photographs, sell a no longer needed dresser on Craig’s List, pay a utility bill, download music, and stay in touch with friends through social media sites like Facebook. There’s no doubt that computers (and the advent of the Internet) have made life more convenient. As a writer, computers have brought the world to my doorstep.
Access to online resources like Wikipedia, articles, maps, news coverage, quotes, statistics, etc. make research a lot easier, let alone how computers have made the writing process itself more efficient. I remember my college days when term papers were painstakingly produced on my old Olympia typewriter – and you had to retype the whole paper if you decided to move a single paragraph. Another major change in our culture was when computers became portable and started running on batteries.Today I work on a laptop, but my iPhone is my ‘pocket’ computer which allows me to have access to the Internet pretty much anytime and anywhere.
Work, for many people, is no longer location dependent. Stay-at-home moms have the flexibility to run businesses from their kitchen table while their babies nap. I realize that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this question, but it’s a blog post, not a research article. The truth is that computers are here to stay. A few years ago my Dad, who was approaching eighty, decided to go out and buy himself a Mac.
He signed up for Apple’s in-store training and drove into town every week for a year to learn how to use this new contraption of his. He said to me, “I never thought I’d live to be eighty, but now that ninety seems to be a possibility, I decided it was time to tackle this new technology so I could stay in touch with the world. ” He’s been like a kid realizing all the ways he can use a computer – and has recently started designing furniture. From toddlers to the elderly, computers have revolutionized the way we live.
