Welcome to the Computer Age

Is that a computer in your pocket or are you just happy to link me.

 

I was a late-comer to the party. I didn’t look at a computer for the first time until 2000. At the time my mental image of “computers” was formed by those old TV shows and movies where the scientist is in his laboratory and there’s this big wall of machines behind him with all these clocks and dials and blinking lights and levers on them . .

But then one day this friend of mine said: “Ace, there are all these old comic strips by you posted on the internet.” So that got my attention. I remember thinking: “Gee, how did THAT happen?” So he dragged me to a public computer at the library and showed me how to use this thing called a mouse — which I fumbled around with at first until I finally got the hang of it. So that’s how that started.

But I really didn’t get hooked on the internet until the Presidential election of 2000, Bush vs. Gore. It was election night and they had these public computers in the lobby of the Student Union Building. And I was amazed at how you could get up-to-the-second election results from virtually anywhere in the country. And if you remember, that was an election that went right down to the wire (and then some). So it was incredibly exciting following the results moment-by-moment in real time.

So they had me at that point. I was hooked. A junkie. Hopelessly addicted to the internet for life. Apparently. Though it wasn’t until 2002 that I finally got around to getting an email address. So by then I was really in the soup.

I never really adapted well to computers. For years, whenever I wanted to go to a link, I would faithfully type out https:// until somebody finally told me you didn’t have to do that. And then it would be years after that before someone told me you also didn’t have to type out www. (Why am I always the last to find out about this stuff??) And it took me YEARS to figure out how to do a simple thing like copy-and-paste (up until that point I used to type out the entire string of words and numbers if I wanted to post a link). But at least to my credit, I CAN say, I have mastered the mouse.

So it’s been 18 years for me since I entered the Computer Age. And it’s amazing how in such a short time, the computers have changed virtually EVERYTHING about modern life. For the better. And for the worse. I guess that’s just how it works.

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