It’s decision time. It’s a question of whether to attempt an expensive upgrade of my home computer system—at the urging of my three sons.
Any thought of acquiring new equipment makes one hark back to the days when a manual typewriter sufficed.
My I-Mac is a quantum leap from the Mac Plus model of the mid-eighties, which could hold as much as two megabytes. This was in the era when Bill Gates himself decreed that nobody would ever need more than two megabytes. Today’s personal computers hold dozens of gigabytes. How much is a gigabyte? Go ask your computer literate 14-year-old.
My sons may be accused of being pushy when they explain that my method of doing things on the computer, such as individual e-mailings, became obsolete last month.
And my grandson and namesake may never really appreciate that five generations ago his great-great-grandmother, whom he never knew, was like millions of others content to hand-write everything.
One unfortunate reality about the computer is that it’s ever evolving. Upgrading means only that next year you’ll need something with more bells and whistles. Always attempting to feed an addiction by constantly upgrading the equipment gets to be expensive. And maybe my low-maintenance manual typewriter wasn’t so bad after all. But I’ll reserve judgment on that issue until after I decide whether to upgrade.
I became addicted to computers, largely due to encouragement from Ron Maestas, a retired Highlands University dean of the business department. He acquired the computer bug early and has published widely in the field, as well as taught computer courses. But mainly, Maestas scoffed at the manual typewriter he spotted in my office, imploring me to use that monstrosity only for addressing envelopes.
Once I acquired a computer I could understand, I went to share my enthusiasm with my parents. I explained this new contraption to them. Dad’s reaction was, “Computers are stupid.” He was right: people build computers and therefore program them with the proper information. But even a relatively primitive hand-held calculator makes it easier to work. How many minutes does it take a student to figure a square root by hand? The calculator will do it instantly.
Mom was afraid of the beast. She felt more comfortable with her Royal wide-carriage electric machine, the kind that generated heat, tended to smoke and dimmed the lights in their house each time she returned the carriage.
At that time, Las Vegas was scheduled to host a state convention of the Catholic Daughters of America; my mom had agreed to produce all the programs.
When I visited, I noticed a handful of programs hot off the platen. On the cover were the time, date and place; on the inside were banquet menus, prayers, list of dignitaries and acknowledgements.
Mom’s idea was to start with a legal-size paper, fold it in two, then in quarters, so the conventioneers would have a booklet-type program. Her way of bolding a word was to repeatedly strike a particular key. And she intended to repeat the process two or three hundred times. The beauty was that each program, in its own way, would be personalized, subject to the usual erasures and strike-overs involved in using a Punic Wars-era typewriter.
It took longer to persuade Mom to let me help her than it did to produce the programs when she finally agreed.
Formatting the separate pages and running them through the printer took about an hour. Her way—allowing for time out to reset the circuit breaker or to hose down the typewriter—would have taken days.
After Mom inspected the several hundred copies of the new and improved program, she didn’t know what to do with her free time, inasmuch as she had budgeted all of Friday and Saturday for typing the programs.
But sometimes I wonder whether I too was hasty in foisting the benefits of technology on a person who was used to doing things her way. Mom herself was pushy when, at the ranch in Levi, NM, where she grew up, she told her parents about this thing called a typewriter.
It’s a characteristic of every generation to believe it’s living in the most modern of times. Even the old Olympia typewriter Dad let me use when I was 8 and he was 45 was, at the time, ultra modern.
In spite of its sounding preachy, every generation must meet change, whether religious, social, political or technological. I constantly remind myself of supersonic air travel, interstate highways and instant communication with other continents via the telephone and internet. And these are changes all of us must face, regardless of age or status.