Computers

From April 2005.

I think about this a lot. How much tech has changed over the nearly 52 years I've been alive. The topic first came to mind a few years ago when I realized/discovered I had staff young enough to not know what life was like BC (before computers). Talk about an eye opener. I can still see the dead-eyed stare from a young woman born after 1980 when I told her I studied Fortran in college and learned out to keypunch. She then rushed off to her cubicle to look up "keypunch" online.

My first encounter with computers was at the 1964-65 World's Fair in NYC when we were able to get printouts from Univac. I got a biographical sketch of Abraham Lincoln. I was thrilled.

In 1969, my senior year in high school, instead of advanced algebra/trig, I took a new class called Computer Math. We learned to program something like looked like a desktop calculator (I don't know if calculators even existed yet and I sure hadn't seen one) on steroid. It was programmed with strings of pairs of letters and numbers that included some symbols that now look like ASCII. It could do math functions and we programmed it to generate Fibonacci numbers.

We also had a larger device that could do big (ie, wide) printouts of such things as programmed blackjack games. It could play up to 6 or so hands at a time. It also had lights blinking on its face so we could watch it break the programming code into binary.

The best part of the class was the visit to nearby Aqueduct Racetrack which was computerized. The computer took up an entire, large room in the basement and we were given sample punch cards as souvenirs. They were punched to say Welcome, and the class and school name.

By the time I was studying psych in college, computers were a big deal. Hunter College didn't have its own, but paid for time on the mainframe at SUNY Albany. I took Fortran in 1973 because it was the programming language of the social sciences and after punching my program cards, I had to hand them in for transmission upstate, then pick up my printout the next day, only to discover sometimes, that I'd mispunched a card on line 82 of 160 and the program bombed and I had to repunch the card, resubmit, then wait another day to see if the program worked so I could hand in my assignment. The professor was from India and hard to understand. It's amazing I completed that class and got my assignments in, even if often they were a day or two late.

I didn't continue with Fortran and by the time I was in library school in 1978 and working in Columbia U's library, computerized circulation systems were coming into vogue. I got to work on CU's batch system. Then I went to work, in 1981, in a big urban library system that was first exploring computerization. Over the next decade, the library automated, got the first PCs (well, Apples) for public use, and new hubby and I got our first PC in 1985, the year we were married. I had asked for it in lieu of an engagement ring. An IBM PC bumped up to an AT, it lasted 5 years. Hubby knew BASIC, a language I'd never heard of, and programmed the thing to have a menu in DOS. I loved that thing, and it's successors.

By the time the early '90s rolled around, Gopher and Archie and Veronica and a host of other cool names were being bandied about along with the brave new world of the Internet. I was lost. The seminar I took at work didn't help clear things up. Then, in Dec. 1995, we got a new PC with enough memory to load AOL. And I discovered cyberland. The World Wide Web came into my life a few years later.

And now here I am, with a website and a dozen blogs, revising html in my primitive fashion, working on the library's website and creating and maintaining the library's own blog. When I look back, I am stunned by how fast and by how much my life has changed because of computers, things that no one in my life could imagine back in 1953 when I was born, things that no one when I was growing up could imagine being part of our everyday lives, at work and at home, getting smaller and smaller.

Just a few weekends ago, I sat in the lobby of a hotel in Baltimore, my laptop chugging away, catching a WiFi wave while I happily surfed the web. Can life get cooler than this? Probably. And I can't wait to see what's next.

Addenda: I majored in psych, ended up becoming a librarian, want to be a writer, and never really knew what I wanted to do with my life. I just fell into things, knew after college that I liked jobs that had to do with books. But I think if I was starting out today, in college now, I'd study web design and computer graphics. Back in the '60s, I couldn't see how I could make a living with art and the options for women, even the encouragement of women to go into certain professions, was lacking. And of course, web design was beyond science fiction. At least, I get to enjoy it as a hobby.

Feeling:

technology