I’ve often thought that the dividing line between my kid’s generation and mine has some sort of extra significance. Of course with the passing of time and sheer progress that divide would be significant regardless. But it seems there’s a line drawn in the sand in this case that doesn’t happen with every generation transitioning to the next. Maybe I’ve missed something and there’s already a name for the phenomena I’m going to try to describe. Or maybe something like this happens with every parent/kid set of generations? Anyway, here goes: Given that at one end, my kids squarely fall into the millennial category, being all currently placed somewhere in their 20s. At the other end of the spectrum my beautiful, aging gracefully wife Michelle and I are at the tail end of the baby boomers. The extra significance (if there is any at all) is this: Our first daughter was born in 1990, right around the time we got our first personal computer or PC, the now venerable, more like a museum piece IBM PS/1. I suppose I was and still am what could be called an 'early adopter'. Even so, daughter #1 and the two daughters that followed have no recollection of, have never existed, without a personal computer and everything it brings in their home.
The IBM PS/1. Early version of a home computer. Did IBM create a monster???
Now as computers go, the PS/1 was little more than an electric typewriter with a screen compared to the easily obtained and inexpensive supercomputers of today. The PS/1 and the dot matrix little printer that came with it set us back over $2000, which fortunately we were able to put on a payment plan through Michelle’s work, because that was a lot of money back then (still is, actually). Being the tech nerd I am, I remember its specs well. It had a '80286' processor, (what the heck was a processor??) a 30 Megabyte hard drive, and 1 Megabyte of random access memory or RAM. IBM touted in their flyer that the RAM was expandable to 2MB. Wow—double!!! I thought if 1MB was good 2MB must be better but I really had no idea why. So I investigated how much it would cost to double the RAM and found out it was over $1000. Needless to say I did not end up with expanded RAM in that model. But the PS/1 did allow us to do the basic computing of the day—word processing, keeping track of our finances, etc. It also had an incredibly slow modem that through connection to a phone line, allowed access to this strange and wonderful thing, the rudimentary Internet of 1990. The online service ‘Prodigy’ was the interface it came bundled with to allow this, with brand new ‘America On Line’ or AOL being its big competitor. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one prevailed. I obtained another brand new thing to me back then, my first email address, preston_swig@prodigy.net. It was the time to start becoming familiar with all the computer lingo that we now take for granted. A period is not a period any more, but a dot. As in 'dot com’. ‘Period com’ just didn't have that modern techy computer feel, I guess. I had never known the little line that I ended up with in the middle of my email address to differentiate myself from the other Prestons online out there was called an underscore. I probably didn’t even need it that early in the game.
For you tech nerds like me out there, I find it interesting to compare the specs of the PS/1 and my current HP desktop PC, now fairly old itself, that I'm using now to write these words. If your eyes glaze over at these numbers and Mhz's and Ghz's , just skip this paragraph!! Even by my calculations, math never being my strong suit, the numbers are staggering in comparison. (And yes I know about Moore's law and all that sort of thing...)
IBM PS/1. Circa 1990
--80286 processor running at 10 Mhz. (several generations before the 'Pentium' chip)
--1 MB of RAM
--30MB hard drive on board
--5 1/4" floppy disk drive
--Operating system: DOS 4.0. No MS Windows here, at least not quite yet. Windows 3.0 was soon to launch.
--Price: $2000 (that is in 1990 dollars of course)
--Connectivity: (What is connectivity...Is that even a word in the computer world of the early 90's???)
HP Latitude Desktop. Circa 2012 or so.
--Intel Core i7-2600 processor running at 3.4 Ghz (runs 340 times faster than PS/1 processor)
--8GB of RAM (8000 times more random access memory than PS/1)
--1 Terabyte hard drive on board (33,333 times more storage space than PS/1)
--DVD/CD read/write drive
--Operating system: Windows7
--Price: $1000 (in 2012 dollars)
--Connectivity: Multiple USB, Wifi, Bluetooth, LAN
(Even the 2012 desktop is already antiquated by today's standards, 5 years being an eternity in the computer world, let alone 27!!!! A truly modern desktop would have a BluRay read/write drive, Windows10, at least twice the RAM and who knows how much more hard drive space...twice at minimum maybe more, plus some sort of gigantic monitor that would take up half my desk.)
My kids, when they got old enough--about the ripe old age of 2 or so, took all this early computing stuff and ran with it, just like many others of their generation. We got them various programs that were touted as games but were really educational in some way. The various Jumpstart programs were big in our young family, and they enjoyed Jumpstart Kindergarten and progressed up through the grade levels. I joked that they would take it all the way to Jumpstart Masters Degree. In their minds the computer had always been there and was just there, part of the fabric of our family’s lives. I had a bit of a different perspective, being filled with amazement at its capabilities, even back then in the infancy of home computing. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that when paying bills the computer would write your checks out for you and all you had to do was sign them. This many years later I still do that frequently instead of the more modern completely electronic payment. Old habits die hard I guess. I started making electronic databases of my stuff, recording lists and other things that I kept in the ‘folders’ that lived in the depths of the computer, another rebranding of a familiar term that amused me. The computer of 1990 was a modern technological wonder of all sorts to me. And I had no idea of what was yet to come. We had now jumped on the train of needing upgraded hardware every couple years to keep up with 'progress'.
Little did she know that one day this would be her job!
Nowadays, 27 years later--the entire life of kid #1, things have changed just a bit. The entire concept of the home PC is old school and on its way out, having lost out to mobility and the ever increasing computing power of the ubiquitous smart phone. Even old fashioned me spends a good deal of time doing something that likely hadn't even been thought of back then--yet another interesting word invention, 'blogging'. My youngest daughter, kid #3 of 3, circa 1995, who never even got to experience the original PC in our house because we had already jumped on the upgrade bandwagon, has a job in digital media getting paid good money to do something that didn't even exist in the times I refer to above. She is an expert in what has become an incredibly pervasive offshoot of that rudimentary early Internet I remember--that of social media. Already an excellent writer, she learned all about writing in college getting an English degree, combined it with the knowledge of social media that has always been part of her life, and Voila! A modern job with one of today's contemporary, successful companies. Frequent visitors of this blog site will know I'm talking about Alyssa, of whom I am very proud!
Every school report I ever did came in some way out of these hallowed pages...hopefully not verbatim.
"Is this the party to whom I'm speaking?" (RIP Gerry Govig)
What is the point of all this nonsense? In the end, I guess we were at a crossroads back then, and as is typical of this sort of thing, didn't even realize it. I can look back on this era of my life and say that the interjection into our lives of that little PC that sat on the dining room table for the longest time was a game changer. One BIG game changer, quite honestly. But it does give people like me (who probably dwell in the past more than necessary) a perspective on what used to be. As we transitioned into the digital age, I started to have an appreciation for the things that were now on their way out, gone or receding into the swirling winds of recent history. The World Book encyclopedia at the end of our hallway, the green corded rotary phone hanging on the wall, writing out checks by hand and keeping a register that I could never find, looking up a phone number in the big thick Yellow Pages kept under the counter--I could go on and on. When that computer came into our house all these things that were staples of my early life started to become antiquated and outmoded. And if I mentioned any of the above to my kids, they would look at me quizzically and say something like "You had to do what???" Progress?? Of course--and necessary, but in my humble opinion also good things to cherish and remember.
Let your fingers do the walking...