Toe in the Water

Computer? Computer!

Computer? Computer!

Way back in the nineties, I decided that it was time I learned about this newfangled thing called the computer. I had actually had some contact with it in the sixties as a friend of mine was employed in the business, but he had scared me off by showing me their inhouse computer. It filled a large room with rows of cabinets containing tape discs and flashing lights and dials. That was enough to scare me off the things for the next thirty years.

By the nineties, however, it was quite clear that computer experience was needed if you were going to get anywhere in most jobs. I signed up for a six-week training course.

Perhaps it was ironic that I should take to the thing like a duck to water. For the first time I understood that the thing was a tool and an incredibly versatile one at that. I dived into it and learned everything the instructor had to teach in the first three weeks. The rest of the time I spent finding out just what the machine was capable of in the areas that interested me most - writing and graphics.

The point is, during those thirty years of my estrangement from the computer world, two inventions had transformed the thing and made it usable by the layman. The first was the invention of the graphic interface, so that we were in a world similar to the real one, instead of lines and lines of incomprehensible code. And the second was the mouse, the device that allowed us to interact with what was on the monitor.

Somehow I had entered the new world at precisely the moment it had become open to me. Word processors had changed from complex programs that required the knowledge of all sorts of secret key combinations to function, into buttons and keys that I could press with the cursor. It still helped to know a bit of DOS code but it wasn’t essential if you were happy enough with what Bill Gates had prepared for you.

Arriving at that moment, I learned from both worlds. The old knowledge was still useful as it was never done away with. If you wanted to change the look and way the machine functioned, it was possible to do a bit of simple coding in DOS and make your computer personal to you. And useful little programs from the early days lived on and were still available, if you knew where to look. Just today, I had occasion to tell someone about Charmap, a program that helps you enter unusual and accented characters into your text. And that is something from the very prehistory of the computer.

The upshot of all this is that there are always more ways than one to get things done in Windows. Want to paste something into a document but there is no Paste option or button in the menu or toolbar? Just hit Control and V on the keyboard. To copy something, use Ctrl and C. That’s really archaeological in origin and, hopefully, it’ll never go away.

It really is a wonderful machine, as long as we remember that it’s a tool. When we start trying to make it into a companion or servant with its own thoughts and feelings, that is when things get a bit dodgy. If you’re lonely, find another human, don’t try to make one.

Come to think of it, isn’t that the lesson of Pygmalion?


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