How Have Computers Changed Our Lives?
A couple weeks ago I blogged about life in the Sixties and mentioned that computers were in existence, but housed in temperature controlled rooms and took up a great deal of space. This made me wonder how our lives have changed since computers have become commonplace.
I attended high school in the late 70’s and remember a small group of students were selected to take a “computer class” which turned out to be a programming class. I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I didn’t see another computer until my first office job in the early 80’s. The insurance company I worked for used computers to store information about a policy holder and generate whole life dividend charts based on a potential client’s age and gender. They were printed out on dot-matrix tractor feed printers (the kind with the holes and perforated edges).
Today computers can be traced to every aspect of life. I write on a computer, send and receive email, check my bank balance, schedule appointments with an online calendar, shop online, put books on hold at the library, do research, play a game of solitaire, store my digital photographs, sell a no longer needed dresser on Craig’s List, pay a utility bill, download music, and stay in touch with friends through social media sites like Facebook. There’s no doubt that computers (and the advent of the Internet) have made life more convenient.
As a writer, computers have brought the world to my doorstep. Access to online resources like Wikipedia, articles, maps, news coverage, quotes, statistics, etc. make research a lot easier, let alone how computers have made the writing process itself more efficient. I remember my college days when term papers were painstakingly produced on my old Olympia typewriter – and you had to retype the whole paper if you decided to move a single paragraph.
Another major change in our culture was when computers became portable and started running on batteries. Today I work on a laptop, but my iPhone is my ‘pocket’ computer which
I attended high school in the late 70’s and remember a small group of students were selected to take a “computer class” which turned out to be a programming class. I wasn’t one of them. In fact, I didn’t see another computer until my first office job in the early 80’s. The insurance company I worked for used computers to store information about a policy holder and generate whole life dividend charts based on a potential client’s age and gender. They were printed out on dot-matrix tractor feed printers (the kind with the holes and perforated edges).
Today computers can be traced to every aspect of life. I write on a computer, send and receive email, check my bank balance, schedule appointments with an online calendar, shop online, put books on hold at the library, do research, play a game of solitaire, store my digital photographs, sell a no longer needed dresser on Craig’s List, pay a utility bill, download music, and stay in touch with friends through social media sites like Facebook. There’s no doubt that computers (and the advent of the Internet) have made life more convenient.
As a writer, computers have brought the world to my doorstep. Access to online resources like Wikipedia, articles, maps, news coverage, quotes, statistics, etc. make research a lot easier, let alone how computers have made the writing process itself more efficient. I remember my college days when term papers were painstakingly produced on my old Olympia typewriter – and you had to retype the whole paper if you decided to move a single paragraph.
Another major change in our culture was when computers became portable and started running on batteries. Today I work on a laptop, but my iPhone is my ‘pocket’ computer which