Personal History: A Love Letter To Computers

Of all the mailing lists I'm on, I count Robert Weissman's corporate-watch list as the most useful. It doesn't deluge me with content, it's blazingly well-written, it's humorous, and it's packed with statistics I wish I could commit to memory (I let my inbox overflow with old messages instead). Last Friday, however, I felt a little let down. Weissman came out with an inflammatory message which warned against giving computers to children.

Unlike much of the mail Weissman sends, this one cited very few statistics, only referring to a report by a group called the Alliance for Childhood which recommends a moratorium on giving children computers until we have a clearer sense of how they damage children physically, mentally, and developmentally. Weissman felt confident enough to include a quote from the Alliance calling these "serious developmental risks."

I haven't read the report yet, and don't feel like I can until later. But I feel compelled to respond to Weissman's tone of alarm. (maybe by the time I read the report I'll want to take back whatever point I come to here...)

I was born in Maine, and lived briefly in a town half an hour west of Portland where our family friends made their own bacon and maple syrup. I did not know that computers existed until I moved to California at the age of five. The first computer I ever met was an Apple belonging to my friend Robert, probably a IIC. It lived in a niche in his family's den, near the washing machine. Robert was the kind of kid who was always being given broken or unwanted appliances by family friends-- alarm clocks, old reel-to-reels, cameras, and his favorite, vacuums-- and turning them into other things (one VCR became an ejectable pencil box). I don't think he's ever gotten into programming, but his series of Macs were resources for our creative development for years, whether they were generating title credits for one of our school video projects or helping us print out banners for our rooms.

Early computers were great resources for experimentation-by accident. The fact that they crashed and broke easily and their workings were relatively transparent was fun. Robert had a game called Grandma's House where you were supposed to decorate your grandma's two-story pad. We quickly found how many items was too many, and discovered what the computer did upon reaching that level (it made mistakes and insisted we had to take some things back.)

Starting in second grade-- the last year we were required to wear saddle shoes to school-- we had a TRS-80 in my classroom. We wrote simple programs in Basic and Logo. Invariably, the computer in the classroom was started on some program to the effect of

10 PRINT "MICHAEL IS THE GREATEST!!!" (or "ELIOT SUCKS," or "MRS. WILSON IS MEAN," take your pick)

20 GOTO 10

at the beginning of the day and run ad nauseam, the monitor flickering beguilingly in the corners of our vision until the teacher turned it off.

About that time we began spending time in the computer lab, a blunt-cornered stucco cube in the upper-left-hand corner of the campus. My mother says that when she was a student at Poly, the building had been used for wood shop and home economics classes. The featureless main room held banks of Apple IIEs and IICs under dim fluorescent lights. There I encountered my first hydraulic office chairs, which were endless fun while we were still light enough to not be able to push them down with our weight.

My mother worked at Poly and stayed late, so my sisters and I spent as much time as we could in the lab after school. There were games on the computers, ASCII and simple graphic ones. My favorite was a horse race game; the horses were represented by asterix, and the borders of the track were equal signs. Another favorite was Super Artillery, a shot-and-trajectory game. These games were frivolous (good exercise for the junior-high students who had programmed them, I'm sure), but I think Super Artillery added to the foundations of my understanding of geometry as much as Logo did. Its challenge was its advantage. When asked to use Logo, we'd write brainless programs which filled the screen with scribbles and abandoned our turtles to their frantic running, but we would sit for the extent of our attention spans to get a trajectory right to bomb another tank.

Educational software was good back then. I haven't seen anything better since, but I haven't really been looking. Educational software didn't really need any of the improvements in graphics or interface that have come along since to do its job. (If you think about it, non-educational games didn't either. We were all as excited about Zelda back then as we are about the latest developments now. We never complained how crummy the graphics were. We never knew. You invested yourself in the little green blip, and sent it off to fight the little blue blips.)

Carmen Sandiego had me studying an atlas so assiduously that the other day I surprised myself by correctly identifying the flag of Belize. I remember a Scholastic game where you had to experiment and combine alien chemicals to create tools you needed, really a good introduction to logic problems. Even simulations of food chains and ecology had their charm. The program I probably spent the most time on was Word Munchers-- I was good at matching phonemes-- unless you count the time Robert and I logged together on Print Shop, making signs to line our rooms with.

The kids who were handiest with computers, and demanded the most time at the keyboard, tended to be the ones who had a computer at home. I was not among these. I'm not sure if that's what kept my computer skills development sluggish until high school, or whether it was lack of interest, or the bias against girls everyone talks about. We didn't get a computer of our own at home until I was in at least fifth grade, and that was a TRS-80, so outdated that the twins and I used it for about a week before returning to our Nintendo.

I did, however, have a chance to go next door and use my grandpa's Tandy every once in a while when it was deemed appropriate that I type up an assignment. (Until junior high, it was never required. I don't know if this was because the teachers thought it wasn't appropriate for us to use computers-- unlikely, there was no popular Internet to evoke fear of porn-- or whether they were paying attention to the kind of disparities the requirement might dig up. Computers were even more of a luxury then.)

Starting up Grandpa's Tandy was an event. Every component had a special plastic slipcover to remove-- the hard drives, the eight-inch floppy drives, the monitor, the printer, the keyboard. Grandpa had worked for Bendix and Caltech (I am embarrassed to say I'm not really sure in what capacity-- I think it had something to do with engineering) and this was a computer he used for work, so there were esoteric incantations he had to type before I could use the machine, unlike the child-oriented machines at school.

The monitor came on in amber and black, different from the green and black Apples and the black and white TRS 80s I worked with at school. It felt like it had a different personality. (Nowadays kids turn on their new computers to find pre-installed color schemes in fully graphic interfaces... the computers come with names like Tangerine and Bondi. I wonder if these kids will ever feel that a monochrome display has a "personality." Whither the text-based universe? Well, I guess it's not really gone... at this very moment someone is painstakingly re-creating the first Star Wars movie in ASCII pictures. I saw part of it the other day. What a labor of love.)

The computer was capable of some pretty neat tricks. Grandpa showed me a program which would find anagrams. We'd play with this for a while, then he would leave me to write my stories. My ability to type was painfully lacking at that point, so after hunting and pecking out a few paragraphs I'd usually get Grandpa to enter the right spells to make the machine print. The daisy-wheeled printer would fill the house with ear-splitting clattering, reel out a few pages of pin-fed paper, and then it would be time to pull the plastic covers on again. I could manage the keyboard and drives by myself, but my arms were short, so my grandfather would pull the covers over the immense monitor and printer.

Typing classes began in junior high. Touch-typing proved too frustrating as the lessons sped up. I reverted to hunt-and-peck, a three-finger variation which I got proficient enough at to squeak by on tests. I felt a little inferior for not learning the skill or keeping up with my classmates, but over time I improved. The way I eventually brought my typing up to speed was hanging out in AOL chat rooms and later sending quick IMs across campus at college. With someone at the other end of the line, there was positive reinforcement for improving my skills, and no stigma. On typing tests I now score about 65 words a minute. Working on my own material, I can probably manage 120. (My mother says never to tell anyone this, or a boss will try to foist all the typing on me.) Whether my typing oddity will further or protect me from repetitive stress disorders remains to be seen.

Junior high also had us working on word processing software and databases. One of my more out-of character perversions is the love of databases I developed then. I took what I'd learned from school home with me, attempting to create a database of all model horses ever made. I remember realizing again and again that I needed new fields. The irritation of having to go back to enter more data had long-term effects. I don't think I'd touched a database since then, but when I started investigating corporate ownership of the media last September, the instincts I'd developed from my junior high data-play were so overpowering that I decided I needed to establish a database in its entirety before hunting down a single piece of data. (Leading, of course, to my getting fired. My boss had so poor a feel for databases that she'd decided to start by storing her data in Word files. We were, as one observer noted, "like oil and water.")

By high school, my parents each had a computer, a Mac and a PC. Dad's machine resided in the office at his house. Mom's was in the room between the living room, dining room, twins' room and hall, where it was easy to get distracted by passers-through or someone engaged with other media (the stereo, TV, or Nintendo). By this point I was enough in love with the machine to be able to enter its space and block everything out. I wrote poetry by collaging school papers and other detritus at random, then using the spell-check function to mutate the results. I could type fast enough to produce almost synchronous stream-of-consciousness pieces. This became an important therapeutic tool, something on the order of biofeedback: I tamed myself out of hurricane tantrums and depressive spells by cooling in the white-on-blue letters of Word Perfect.

Mom signed up for AOL, and the twins and I each got our own screen name. Though Robert and I had spent one day trying to figure out how to use a modem to contact another girl in our class, the screech of the device was a novelty, an alien song to listen to as you waited to see if your scrawny 2600-baud would perform its trapeze act correctly.

When I got to college I met boys who had been on bulletin boards for years, pulled whatever software they wanted out of the ether, and got themselves arrested for messing with school computers, but I skirted the shady parts of AOL while I was still in high school. My friend Catherine and I did have a brief spell where we amused ourselves by joining sex chats to lure men into compromising positions, then "virtually castrate" them. For the most part, though, I just looked for other kids who liked the music I did and did the same things at school. Friends with similar interests were not easy to come by at Poly. Chats were a reassuring widening of the horizon.

High school was still important to my computer development, though it was more an autodidactic process than before. I learned layout software working on the school literary magazine, picking up rudimentary knowledge of Apple networking, image manipulation, and command keys in the process. Robert was still the bellweather I looked to for computers; he always had the latest stuff, and since he worked at a computer store he knew enough to help set up and doctor my mom's machine.

I got my first computer of my own when I graduated from high school. It was a Performa 6214C PowerPC. I named it Frank, after the unseen namesake of a computer-animated short film. Though I'd been on Macs for years at that point, having one of my own was a new experience. I got to customize the look of it as I saw fit. I organized the files and got to screw around under the hood as needed.

Earlier this year a friend watched me using Frank, and pointed out that I was swirling the mouse around in circles as I waited for a website to load. "You're waiting to see when it crashes, aren't you?" he asked. I told him it was just something I did when I was bored. Then I realized he was right. I had gotten in the habit of circling the mouse from the early days of using my machine, while I was still testing how many applications I could have open before Frank crashed. My phyiscal reflexes harmonize with my machine. I could tell from the clicks Frank was making whether he was hung on a problem or still working. I've developed a Pavlovian relationship with my email and chat programs: I press a button, they deliver love from people far away.

I have a new computer now, an indigo iMac I have christened Galataea (the name of Pygmalion's statue). She is quieter than Frank. I can't tell what she's thinking before she hangs. I don't know which application combos are toxic to her. Her display ripples strangely, and while she plays my Phillip Glass CD she is making little scrapey noises over a chainsaw-like hum. I don't know how to calm her yet.

Still, the loss of my reflexes is no bad tradeoff. Frank was so handicapped by obsolescence that I couldn't use the internet anymore. Not only that, but Galataea can store the contents of Frank's brain, plus three Zip disks, plus some four hours worth of MP3s, and she still has 17 GIGS of memory left.

Enough personification. More than having their own brains and habits, my machines store my brain. Five years of correspondance, scribblings, collages, paperwork, and more valuable products of my own head. If I lose them I will be bereft. I imagine I will feel as if I've lost my hometown, or my brain is degenerating at a Reaganesque rate, rapidly enough to notice.

You can worry about this kind of dependence if you want. I am never going to be a person who memorizes great volumes of verse (unless I land in jail for longer than I expect); I will rely on my computer to do too much memorizing for me, perhaps. Maybe people will not do that anymore. But is memorization any better? People die without committing their verses to paper, or to anyone else.

I am worried about the physiological problems this machine is causing me. I have a permanent slouch. The nerves in my hands tingle and snap. As I consider writing as a career I wonder if I should insure my wrists the way Jennifer Lopez has insured her ass. I want wrist braces. I want bionic limbs, so I can keep writing until I am eighty. While I'm at it, I'll take one of those headsets I saw MIT students wearing at the Geek Pride Festival, which project a little monitor right into your eye, ocarina-shaped keypad at your waist. I don't give a damn for things which enhance your strength, like steroids, or your kozmik sense, like shrooms, or your public image, like a monogrammed Land Rover. I want extenders on my information storage and communication capabilities.

I recently reread Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age, having read it for the first time in April. I don't reread books that quickly nowadays, but there is an idea in that book that gives me pause. A man creates a computerized book for the granddaughter of his boss, which he subsequently steals for his own daughter. This book is intended to provide growing girls with a supplement to their education, one which will guide them towards being brave, rational, free-thinking individuals with a broader range of skills than their Victorian society will provide them. Along the way a copy falls into the hands of one poor orphan, and then to a man who distributes it to thousands more orphans who are languishing in the hands of their state. The story primarily follows the first orphan, who is able to transcend her abusive family situation and is accepted into a private school as a result of what she has learned from this book, which contains as much information as a library as well as tools like a microscope and telescope. This scenario provides more than a technological solution; behind the book is a woman who teaches the orphan through the mediation of the book.

This is a fairy tale which is practically tailor-made for me, I admit. I work with a school which is 20th from the bottom of 670 New York City schools in academic scores. Some third-graders there can't read or add. You can't help but grope around for a magic bullet when you find a child who can't sound out a word on her own.

Computers have been an important force in developing my organizational and logical skills. More importantly, they have helped me learn to teach myself. So little effort needs to be made to turn a computer into a rich and appealing learning device. The more transparent its workings can be made, the better: my peers learned a lot from the days when computers were easy to break and the language that ran programs was the language you used to talk to the machine.

There is too much to be gained here to make rash proposals about keeping children away from computers. For god's sake don't install computers at the expense of teachers, but I think a better effort needs to be made to look into how the machines can be used to teach a child.

* * * *

now I need to go to bed. and also backtrack and read the article I'm ostensibly railing against. heh heh.

Let's consider this a rewrite of my Div III. As the six of you who saw it-- before I buried it sixty feet under a slab of impenetrable kryptonite in an unmarked location in the Andes-- know, my Div III consisted of a series of prejudgements and whimsical hypotheses about computer users, strung on the skeleton of about half a dozen interviews with close personal friends. I should have left my ideas where they came from: my own experience. In other words, I should have written a Division Me, or admitted was writing one.

Posted by Gus at October 05, 2000 11:15 PM