Yes, that's me. Not many adults my age have pictures of them on computers at such a young age. I was talking to my husband whose parents had a computer in the house but it was for "taxes" and he wasn't allowed to use it. My parents had us using every computer in the house and I know this contributed to my tech savvy nature as an adult.
I talked with my dad a lot this week about the computers we had. The one in the pictures could have been our old Leading Edge PC, which came out the year I was born and we purchased in 1987. It could have had at most 512kb of memory. To put this in perspective, that is about the size of FIVE small pictures. It may have been our Mac IIcx which had our first color screen. When my father bought this computer which has a shocking 20mb hard drive, my grandfather exclaimed, how are you ever going to fill up all that space! It is more likely that it is one of the later computers we had, maybe our PC 80386 or our Mac IIsi. This cutting edge computer had 40mb on it's hard disc. I have 200 times that space in my relatively out of date iPhone.
My favorite computer we had was by far our Macintosh Portable.
It was the precursor to today's laptops. Weighing only 16 pounds, my dad described how excited he was to actually take this computer with him.
Now a days, I am constantly lamenting how out of date my resources are at school. How slow the bandwidth is and the lack of technology in general. It was refreshing to look back and see how far I have come and we have come with technology. It has certainly been exciting literally growing up with computers and I cannot wait to see where technology takes us and education in the future.
Hi Marrisa,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post this week. Thanks for a little “blast from the past.” I enjoy traveling back to the past to see how much progress our society has made with technology. I feel like I appreciate it more every time I look back. I love the connection you made about the space you have on your out-of-date IPhone relative to the space you had on one of your old computers. This made me laugh.
I also feel that I complain frequently to myself about having out-of-date technology in my classroom and about the limited availability of resources. Your post, in a sense, has humbled me on this because it reminded me how far we have come. Thanks for sharing your personal pictures and experiences!
Hello, Marissa,
ReplyDeleteWhat a funny, engaging piece, as always. I especially loved your illustrations and details on specs of all these gadgets. Your narrative really goes to show how the last three decades have changed how humans communicate and how much creative power computers have placed in the hands of regular folks.
By way of anecdote: I am older than you. When I started college, papers were still typewritten, which means it took me three times as long as it does today to create a piece of writing I could live with. I normally did, at minimum, two rewrites and then a final draft. Having a computer did not necessarily make me a better writer, but it sure made me a faster, less frazzled one.
On the subject of writing, which is one of my interests and passions, it’s been said that writing gave humans the luxury of forgetting (when people did not write, oral histories were more important, therefore remembering was a muscle that had to be flexed on a regular basis). Something similar occurs with all forms of technology adoption. In the case of computers used as writing tools, spelling as a practice has fallen by the wayside a bit. So has handwriting in general. You gain some, you lose some; that’s the moral of the story.
Thanks again for a personable, thoughtful post.
Claudia
Hello Marrissa,
ReplyDeleteYour post definitely brought me back! I remember starting my first job at a local college and my first task was to type up labels using an old fashioned typewriter. The program we used to look up student records was DOS based and we were still grading entrance exams by hand. We sure have come an extremely long way than before and your blog was a nice way of remembering that. I wonder what our students will remember and think about "Ipad's " in 30 years. Will they be as ridiculous sounding as your dads 16 pound laptop? I hope so! Great post.