Something That Has Improved Since I Was a Kid

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt has a short answer. I don't need a lot of words to describe it.

The answer is: computers. Computers are purely a luxury. Neither individuals nor societies need them, and the case could be made that we're better off without them. Ah, but for some of us they're so much fun.

The number of people for whom computers were fun was much smaller when I was a kid, when about all computers could do was simple calculations using very large numbers. "Small" computers were the size of refrigerators; they had to be all but sealed into their own offices, away from potential contaminants like loose hairs or stray hairpins, or the certain death of computers exposed to natural changes in temperature and humidity. Most people didn't expect we'd ever see a computer in real life.

I was a teenager when microchips were invented. Suddenly, instead of getting their information from big clunky punched cards and storing it on disks the size of two-hour movie reels, computers could get their information from little chips of silicon and store it on floppy disks the size of greeting cards. There was room for one in your house, your office, even your dorm room. In a few years computer "languages" were efficient enough that people who didn't have the math gene were learning them. Children's magazines offered simple programs (a few very rich children of indulgent parents) could type into the family computer to get it to display a message like "Happy Mothers Day" or draw a simple image of a desktop computer with strings of X's. Children I knew personally were locked out of the office rooms where their parents' computers were kept, as were their baby-sitters,

By this time I was old enough to be expected to write programs that would do something useful. To stay on the Dean's List I programmed a school computer to drill freshmen on Spanish verbs, with instructions for tweaking the program to sdd other languages. On a job I helped, mostly by typing in zipcode parameters, to get a computer to look up zipcodes, because older subscribers were still forgetting to add them to their addresses when they wanted to subscribe to magazines. Then I bought a computer that came pre-programmed to do very simple word processing, and that was all I, personally, needed. I coded no more. 

It was cool, though, to be able to work on computers. Before 1979 my brittle, continually shedding hair would have been a valid excuse to ban me from the computer lab. The 1980s were awesome because now even girls with brittle hair could play with computers too.

And, perhaps foolishly, we thought that all humans had enough human feelings for our fellow humans that the ability to build robots with "artificial intelligence" wouldn't lead directly to the slaughter of humans deemed not intelligent enough to be fun to know...or too intelligent to support dictatorship. 

So everybody and their dog and cat, sometimes literally, wanted computers of their own. I vowed I'd never spend money on one after the long-gone word processor from Radio Shack; I was in control, I could stop with one.. I've acquired quite a collection from grateful clients. I sold Arnie's desktop computer, with the version of Word that was hustled off the market because it could be copied and added to any desktop computer via floppy disks, and Mark's word processor, which was really just a typewriter with floppy disk storage that allowed quiet typing and editing-before-prnting, long ago. The one we always called Joan's (Zahara Heckscher's original given name was Joan), the Original or Practically Perfect Toshiba, was a classic but eventually its plastic outer shell started crumbling at a touch; I discarded it only this year. The desktop computer Earle built, in the free Saturday afternoon class for seniors at the community college, has been in the repair shop a few times but is still working, almost perfectly, and still plugged in today; it has Windows ME, the practically perfect program for practically everything I want to do on a computer, except connect to the Internet. 

That brings us to the current century. I still have most of the floppy disks I used and reused with the computers I may always love best, Earle's and Joan's, which also became memorials to two very dear friends who died too young, both from cancer. It became more practical, however, to keep the New Desktop Computer, which can transfer documents from floppy disks to more functional thumb drives, and the Sickly Snail, a puny Dell laptop that never had enough memory to work very well but \did allow me to compose documents offline and upload them right into blogs and hackw riting sites. Then came the sleek HP laptop Grandma Bonnie Peters seldom used for a few years and then handed down to me, another precious gift from another departed friend; by now it's consuidered an antique rather than "top of the line," but I paid to have its memory resurrected because it's still a treasure. When it ran out of memory and died, yet another dear friend, who also has died from cancer by now, gave me the Piece Of Garbage; it was not his fault, he just went into a store and grabbed the one secondhand laptop computer they had that met my specifications, and nobody told him it reduced electricity consumption by crashing every time the battery came close to a full charge to force its owner to use that battery. I was glad to replace it with the Unsatisfactory Toshiba I'm using now, which may be physically worthy of the same brand as the Practically Perfect Toshiba, but is infested with Windows 10. 

Finally there's the one I rescued from the landfill this summer, currently in the shop having its passwords reset and being scanned for porn and virus. Most men are reported to be unable to own a computer without using it to look at porn, but women are at least frugal enough to remember that porn attracts bad things to computers, so I want it all scraped out of mine before I log into any web sites. It took me three months to find a way just to get that thing into the shop and I'm still not sure when I'll be able to get it out. But I will. Before I ever owned anything electronic I knew that my Green conscience won't let me send them to the landfill, even if they are the POG, programmed to make any user want to pitch them into the nearest lake. I didn't scrap the POG. I traded the POG. I would have had trouble sleeping at night if I had thrown it into a lake, despite its incredible Lake Magnetism. 

I still have all the useless shells of cell phones I've ever owned, too, and the camera that uses the cards no other device seems to be able to read any more. I don't like to send them to the landfill either. 

I think the state of computer technology has, for most people who want to use it, actually gone down during my lifetime. Windows ME did just about everything a private person or small business could want; the only "app" I ever wanted to add was one for setting up sheet music in PDF documents, and you can download those for free on anything that connects to the Internet now. Windows 10, Windows 11, now Windows 365, may offer more spyware for the corporations but offer no additional benefit, and actually offer reduced functionality, for people who want to type term papers or work with spreadsheets or check e-mail. But I was not exactly a kid when ME came out and, relative to the skewed population in cyberspace, I was "old" when Windows 10 came out--so I can still say that computers have improved since I was a kid.