I have a friend who has been using PCs since the late seventies. She talks about those days and the progression of the PC the way our grandparents talk about the development of the telephone and the automobile.
She worked for a small-town newspaper that produced its copy using a million dollar mainframe computer. The process was very much like what we call desk-top publishing these days, except it took a large computer in a climate controlled room, several “unintelligent” terminals and a lot of time to produce all the text that went into the newspaper every day. The terminals consisted of monitors and keyboards, but the computer’s guts, were in the climate-controlled room.
My friend had a Commodore 64 at home and was one of the first people in her area to have a modem. Whenever she was on assignment and her house was closer than her office, she would go home and send her story to the newspaper via her Commodore. She was the only one who had such sophisticated equipment. That was only about 25 years ago.
I remember getting my first computer. It was a Wang 2200 that had a hard drive with 90 megabytes of memory. The salesman told me that’s all I’d ever need. I had to pay somebody to haul it away.
Now I have a server with four monitors on my desk, and I control it all with a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Part of the reason my friend was so far ahead of her peers was her openness to new things and her lack of fear of this new technology.
She has also purchased computers for her brothers’ families. At the time, they could afford their own computers but didn’t think they were necessary for their children’s educational experience. Remember when you used to wonder why people needed their own computers? My friend knew better. Now, they like all of us who have had computers for a while, don’t know how they lived without them.
I recently offered to buy my mother a computer. I told her that many of our relatives in Italy have them and use email extensively. Wither own computer, she would be able to connect with them very easily at little cost. She declined. Like so many older people, she reasons she’s gotten along for generations without one. Why should she have one now?
And, like most children, Jordan and Jared think of computers as just a reality of their everyday worlds. They have that childlike inquisitiveness that allows them to approach a computer without fear and with an open-mindedness that makes anything possible. They are always asking why things happen and what would happen if things were different and how things work. As they get older, they will learn to use the computer to answer those questions.
I’m telling you this story because both my friend and my children have a learner’s mentality, and it’s the same kind of mentality we all have to have to succeed in a world where, in only 25 short years, we’ve gone from computers that needed their own room to computers we carry around in our pockets.
Although PCs evolved slowly in their first decade, they now reinvent themselves annually. A new computer can become obsolete before you take it out of the box. That fact alone should remind us that we cannot shut down our learner’s mentality, no matter how old we get. My mother is missing out on a chance to communicate freely and often with our relatives in Italy while my children have no limitations. Even those of us with an attitude of open inquiry cannot imagine what the future holds for them.
Frightening? Absolutely not. It’s exciting. And as long as we can emulate their openness, our own prospects are limitless.
Original writing date: August 2002