The Computer and Us

The computer. Few if any modern inventions could define our world of today more precisely than this marriage of electronic software and hardware. And few areas in the scientific and tecnological evolution of human society, have elicited more comment, more sould-searching and more equivocation than this. But like the motor-car, which still has its many detractors, the computer is here to stay, for good or evil. Hopefully it is for the former, it all depends on how we use it. After all, we still have not learnt how best to live with the motor-car which is arguably much more capable of harming our environment than the computer and perhaps, although it may not seem so at present, less useful and revolutionary than the computer, not to mention its more powerful and all-pervasive younger sibling, the Internet. But, notwithstanding the indisputable significance of the Internet, which is still growing, I will be restricting my comments in this blog to the computer per se, the Internet will be the subject of a future blog. After all, it deserves a whole blog to itself!

I'm old enough to recall a time when the manual typewriter was the order of the day and the last word in office equipment, along with the xerox photocopier - and the only electrical device on my desk was the telephone! Then came the electric typewriter, which represented a modest leap forward, after which it was not long before the electronic typewriter arrived on the scene. The electronic typewriter often came fitted with a short narrow strip of LCD screen on which appeared the words that you typed, though as yet there was no way of making integrated corrections other than by using the correction track of a combined typing and correction ribbon, itself a great improvement on the hand-applied snopake/tippex correction fluid or correction paper strip. By now some large companies had set up so-called computer rooms where rows of grey cabinets whirred away with the sound of rotating spools of data tape which impressed by their sheer bulk and number than by their computing ability. It was not in fact until the arrival of the first batch of machines which ran on elaborated programs and had decent-sized text display screens that the modern-day computer was born in any real sense of the word. And with the computer it was recognised that some sort of printer was needed to produce hard copy. We were now in the 1990s and the home computer age had truly arrived, having grown out of the computer developed for business and industrial needs. The next few years would see constant improvement of the software and hardware that would turn these rudimentary electronic machines into powerful, flexible and ever more capable computers that would proliferate in the office environment as a multi-use tool.

My first computer was the humble Amstrad model which came packaged with a separate keyboard and printer. The software was basic, the monitor was small, and the printer, fitted with a daisy-wheel printing component, was about as noisy as the old golf-ball typewriter, as it too was based on the percussion principle. But it was a start and the price was reasonable for the time, which is why the Amstrad computer became so popular in its first years. Later on, as more capable computers came on stream and were made available at competitive prices, the Amstrad, which could not compete in terms of capability, began to lose ground and eventually disappeared. But it had introduced many thousands of people to the principle of the computer and now the market was ready for a whole host of different makes and models, sporting new and attractive refinements. As I began to lose patience with my noisy and very limited daisy-wheel printer and the equally limited software which ran it, I realised it was time to throw it out and acquire one of the new crop of computers running on Windows 98 and using the quiet ink-jet printers. I was ready for the next step up in the computer ladder.

Since then and several models on, the computer has become an integral part of my life, both for work and for leisure, as it has for millions and millions of people worldwide, and its appeal has of course been enormously boosted by the Internet. Indeed for many people who do not use the computer for work purposes, the Internet and all its trappings - e-mail, games, networking, social encounter sites, and other online applications - are the sole reason for its appeal and this has fuelled an exponential growth in its take-up, going into many millions of homes and being duplicated inside each home as each member of the household feels the need to have his own exclusive machine, often within a network and sharing a common signal from a device known as a router. The computer, whether a desktop or a laptop or indeed both, is a familiar piece of furniture in every household. Even the common television set has now been recruited to double up as a computer terminal!

The computer has truly come of age, going from being a purely practical and rather limited industrial machine to a powerful must-have multimedia device in every home, as numerous as the tv set and with much greater potential. It is not for nothing that the times we are now living in have been christened the Computer Age and this is just the beginning. Our lives now are influenced and shaped by the computer and our living habits are fast changing as a consequence of our changing relationship with this ever-more powerful and capable piece of machinery . There is hardly a field of human activity that has not been affected by the computer as it spreads its tentacles into every aspect of human existence. But this brings us on to the other aspect of computing, a veritable revolution in itself with unimaginable ramifications and implication - the Internet - and that is something I will be looking at in another post.