From Technophobe to Alpha Geek: Computers

Skip the BS.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Hackito ergo sum.”—Anonymous

President Eisenhower:“Is there a God?”
Anonymous Computer:“There is now.”

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—10/3/11—In 1946,The University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC computer, built for the US Army, weighed 30 tons, cost $500,000, and occupied 680 square feet—or one New York apartment.

Completed too late to help The Manhattan Project, its first job was to calculate the internal dimensions and external consequences of the hydrogen bomb. Thirty years later, Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, wrote, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

When I read that, I thought, “And there’s no reason for the hydrogen bomb, either.”

In 1980, our former minister confessed that he and his wife were “technology atheists” because they did not “believe in those $1,000 paper weights.” I wrote back that despite having the last brain furnished with vacuum tubes, I had to think computers would soon be a fact of life whether we kept the faith or not.

All my friends in the sciences were telling me to prepare myself but, like most Liberal Artisans, I was reluctant to respond. In 1983, Time named the computer the “Machine of the Year” in lieu of the traditional “Man of the Year” or, more recently, “Person of the Year.” Of course, Hitler and Stalin had once made Time’s covers, so I wasn’t sure whether the computer was named for the harm it posed or the good.

In 1987, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike gave in to the pressure and began using a word processor, but he did not buy a modem because, he said, he had all the “time-sucking distractions” he needed.

I understood what he meant when a computer-averse colleague bought an electric typewriter with a 95-page instruction manual, which struck me as a considerable distraction.

Whatever happened to peppering a piece of onion skin so hard the “o’s” fell out? Back in the 1960s, with no manual at all, I had taught myself to hunt and peck well enough to write a letter home. Good men coming to the aid of their country, I decided, needed manual typewriters.

In an essay reprinted in Harper’s in 1988, that mossback Wendell Berry admitted that he still wrote with pen and paper which his wife transcribed on a typewriter, circa1956. Somehow, he reasoned that if he succumbed to the charms of a word processor, he’d have to jettison not only his Royal, but “my wife, my critic, my closest reader, [and] my fellow worker.”

In my copy of Berry’s essay, I scrawled a big red question mark next to that line, under which I wrote, “If you’re really serious, Wendell, why not write with a goose quill on birch bark?” Though I still had a sign on my office door reading, “Pothole on the Infobahn,” my sympathies were shifting.

In March of 1991, I walked into my office one morning and found a brand-new Macintosh Classic sitting on my desk. I had known it was coming because the Dean had declared the college was going “paperless” and, with this device, all memoranda would be handled electronically.

Shortly after my “free lunch” arrived, I saw a Macintosh ad that read, “You can spell-check everything . . . to ensure letter-prefect clarity!” It was not a good omen, and the department seemed to be using more paper than ever printing e-mailed memos.

Nevertheless, I eventually unpacked the Mac Classic and found myself in a puzzlement. I decided that I needed more help, so I signed my wife and me up for some instruction offered by the school. The first night, five or six of us novices were sitting at a row of computers facing the instructor with a screen of his own. “OK, let’s get started,” he said after we’d mastered the on-off switch. “Now type, ‘Are you in?’” That’s what my brain understood, but what he meant was, “R-U-N.” Suddenly, a yellow exclamation point popped up on my screen, with a message reading, “There has been an error transferring your mail. I said, pass, shhhh! Don’t tell anyone . . . .” I figured the ghost in the machine was angry with me, but it was just some mysterious jargon I have never unraveled.

After Ingrid and I became comfortable sending e-mail and surfing some of the less daunting waves on the net, she started calling India and the Philippines for technical assistance. One day, she called about installing some virus protection, and a patient fellow in Mumbai told her, “OK, now pull up your desktop.”

Ingrid, who’d been on the phone for over an hour, said, “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t. My computer is sitting on it.”

For several months, we both felt like cannibals dining with silver forks but, eventually, we acquired a taste for the new cuisine. After I realized I wasn’t going to lose my written work if I made too many changes, and that one can make a thousand turns in the net’s labyrinth and never get lost, we fell in love with this technological miracle.

Though I still feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose when I’m using Google, I love the access I have to millions of documents that I used to borrow on inter-library loan. More than once, I have closed a session with “Peecee,” as I call her, with a kiss the lips of her screen.

In an interview reprinted in Harper’s in September of 1996, Kurt Vonnegut said he’d never use a computer because typing a manuscript and walking it to an urban post office, what his wife considered “farting around,” was so much fun. On his way, he typically spoke to his typist by cell phone, some neighbors in a queue at the local newsstand, the vendor with a jewel in her forehead, and the postal clerk on whom he had a crush. Even with Skype, computers will never take the place of face-to-face contact, and anyone who’s taken an on-line course realizes that.

Nevertheless, poor Kurt never got a computer tan. He went to his grave in 2007 without tasting the pleasures of writing on a computer.

I’ve been recording my thoughts online for 20 years now, and people write me from all over—a Hell’s Angel who wanted to know why he should have to wear a helmet as I’d advocated; a member of the NRA hot about my position on taxing ammunition to reduce the number of gun fatalities; my Calvinist sister who questioned my belief in free will; and a student at Bob Jones University who doubted whether I’d been to the school just days after I’d returned.

Best of all, my father, who lived a thousand miles away in south Florida, and whom I saw perhaps once a year, began using e-mail in the late 1990s. I now have hundreds of his letters in a scrapbook that I would not have had without the computer.

You need to know that Dad is a taciturn Midwesterner, but once he mastered the new technology, he wrote, “Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me some e-mail.” Though a computer carded me buying a six-pack of beer recently, that’s a prayer I repeat every night.

Like robots the world over, the BI-LO computer was just doing its job, while freeing humans for tasks that machines will never usurp—smiling and meaning it.