On the Cusp of the Computer Revolution; How I traversed the Divide from Ignorance to Geek Girl

I remember reading a science fiction story about how aliens landed on earth and came upon a watch, the old fashioned wind-up kind. The aliens knew from looking at this artifact that there were human beings, “humanoids” in their parlance, on this planet because the design of a watch is by definition artificially-made. I’ve often struggled with this idea that you could tell by looking at something that it was made by people or, presumably by God. After all, is not the human body surely even more complex than a timepiece? I’ve come to think that the watch was not so much more “complex” than anything in nature per se, but rather that it was structured in a kind of “digital” way, as opposed to the analogue style that human bodies are created. I realize that’s a peculiar way to describe our bodies, but I think you might know what I mean. It’s about a created formal structure versus one that developed intuitively, and in the case of human beings: in the confluence of Darwin and a Higher Power; in my opinion anyway.

So let’s go back in time a few decades from the alien landing to the early 1980’s when ATMs made their debut. My mom had to face one down for the first time and I went along to hold her hand at the scary big money machine. The nice thing about ATMs is that they are kind of idiot machines in that they tell you exactly what to do: “Press start. Press here to withdraw money. How much do you want? In tens or twenties? Thank you Mom, we appreciate your business!” Still, it was the first machine my mother ever had to deal with when it came to business, and she got through it with some aplomb once she figured out that it was really just a super big typewriter that spit out money instead of letters.

The Unplumbed Mystery of My First Computer
Fast forward a wee bit to 1984, which I’m sure you can all recall thanks to George Orwell’s book of the same name, not to mention the debut of the Macintosh. It’s the latter that interests me because one arrived in the attached garage/bedroom of my friend Lorna sometime around then, although with somewhat less fanfare than a hot mama breaking a movie screen with a giant hammer. Now you have to remember that being born in 1963, I did not grow up with computers. There were only a few in high school and they weren’t anything I was even barely aware of, and in my undergraduate work at Temple University they existed for programming classes. Oh and by the way, just so you know, I flunked out of my first programming class. But I blame that on the professor who spoke with such thick accent that I hadn’t a clue what he was saying. They didn’t have “desktop computer” classes in those olden days, only programming classes.

So there I am one day in the garage out back of my house in San Diego, California with my partner Mark and my best friend Lorna. They were, by the way, destined to get married some ten years later, but that’s another story. Don’t worry, though, it’s not sordid. We’re all sitting on stools around the tool shelf with this beige box (got that: a TV), keyboard (got that: typewriter) and a, well, something or other on a wire hooked to the back. It’s the Macintosh and none of us had the slightest idea what to do with it. See here’s the thing: a computer is not an ATM in that there are directions. That is: “Press start. Press here to withdraw money. How much do you want? In tens or twenties? Thank you Mom, we appreciate your business!” You can turn it on, sure, but what do you see? Not really anything. We were pretty stuck and the result was that the box sat around on the tool shelf for quite some time while we considered what to do with it. The problem was more than the fact that there weren’t any directions like “Press here to type a letter.” The real problem is that for us – all college educated kids I might add – there was no basis on which to hang the idea of a computer, nothing to start from. In my job we call that a conceptual framework, or rather a lack of one.

An Irrevocable Change in the Structure of My Brain (Freaky!)
Fast forward twenty-five years later and not only am I a Geek Girl myself, but you, dear reader, are probably a thousand times more educated about technology than I was in 1985. A million times really, because we knew just about NOTHING, and a million times nothing is still nothing, right? I ask you then, how did I go from nothing to Geek Girl, when other people who are my age cannot seem to make that transition? Well, I don’t quite know the answer to that question but I do know this. The first thing I learned on the Macintosh was how to draw pictures in the paint program; next came word processing; and once I realized how much better that was than typing, the rest is history.

Don’t let that “rest is history” thing pass you by too quick however. There’s a very significant event that happened in there. A little switch got pushed when I started off with that paint program, even though I could not have known it. Something changed irrevocably in the structure of my brain; there became a new way of thinking about how things work that was not there before. In other words, before that Macintosh, Mark, Lorna and I didn’t even know how to begin to think about what to do with the computer. Today you could put me in front of any kind of technological object and I may not have a clue what it is, but I would know how to get something started, even if it was the wrong something. And that is the significant difference between 1985 and now: understanding the conceptual framework of the artificial intelligence – if you will – of a computer.

There’s something else that’s key to learning about technology, something which oddly enough many users don’t seem to understand. That is that most things you learn about one application are easily applicable to other applications, not to mention other computers like PCs. That is, most software is mostly the same working parts (new file, save, etc), and computers also have the same parts (create new folder, check the sound setup, etc.). So, once you have a foundation, the rest is basically just another step of looking around the menus and finding what you want.


Uh oh, Back to the 1970’s and Computer Cards, but just for a Minute
I’m going to bounce back in time once more and talk about my dad and when I visited him at work when I was in elementary school, because I don’t want you to think I’m totally ignorant about the history of computers. We’re talking circa 1970’s and I’d go with him every weekend to his work with him at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. They’re the people who do the SATs of course. He was working at the time with a manual calculator – one of those giant number adding things about the size of a typewriter. But he also worked in the big computer room, typing something or other out on Fortran computer cards and printing it out on big long sheets of green and white striped computer paper several miles long. What was he doing? I haven’t the foggiest idea.

What was I doing in the computer room? Actually, I was typing out idiotic things on the Fortran cards and sometimes he even let me print them out on the green sheets. He probably would have been canned had ETS known what he was letting his foolish daughter do, but whatever (I was a wee bit spoiled). I wonder how my dad would have handled moving to the computers of today. Would the structure of his brain been able to move smoothly into desktop computers? Or would his “programming” thinking style prevented him from making that transition? Both him and my mom are in heaven now, where presumably e-mail is not necessary, so I guess we’ll never know.

If you have any thoughts on all this, please do share them with me. I’m as just about in the dark sometimes as the aliens and all I have is the digital clock on my computer. With the thunderstorm going on outside my office, I might even lose that and then where will I be?

Digitally Yours,

~ SuperTechnoGirl