By Eleanor Kazdan, April 4, 2019 — When I was a child I vaguely heard about the computer. It was a mammoth machine that took up a whole room, and the only time I actually saw one was in the movies. It seemed like science fiction. In 1967, my last year of high school, I was given the opportunity to learn how to use one of these huge machines. We learned how to write a program in Fortran, submitted it to the teacher, and from my recollection, the information was coded on various colors of punch cards. It was all very mysterious. Unfortunately, I always seemed to make some small error in my program, and never had success. When I started university the next year the only contact I had with computers was notes that my physicist boyfriend wrote to me on pink computer punch cards.
I didn’t think about computers again for many years. In about 1987, just after I had gone back to graduate school, my husband decided to buy our first computer. It was quite expensive, and although not as big as the original mammoths, took up a whole corner of a spare bedroom. I learned how to use the word processing program. This seemed like a miracle to me. I could type my essays without worrying about making mistakes, as they could be corrected without a problem. No more cutting and pasting for the finished product.
Everything seemed like science fiction. Soon we could email people and they would immediately receive our message.
In the ’90’s the huge computer became a smaller desktop, and the prices of computers came down to a fraction of their former cost. Next came very portable computers like the iPod, then the iPad and the smartphones. The developments were dizzying, changing like the speed of lightening. Then came total dependency on the computer as well as crimes and hacking into computer data. At times I long for a simpler, non-computerized life. But they are definitely here to stay. I now have an Apple watch, and can receive emails and text messages without even taking out my phone or tablet.