which is available to Bart Simpson but not necessarily accessed by David L Lewis
There is a story I’ve told many times about how when I was seventeen my father said, “There’s no future in computers”. For a number of years it seemed he was right. The first computer I ever saw took up most of the space of an enclosed room the size of our dining room. In the 1970s my brother and I stopped at an IBM office to ask about a computer which would do simple bookkeeping. It was about 10 feet long and cost $55K. A friend of mine used to say he was the last person on earth able to buy a floppy-drive driven desktop computer for only $40K.
The world changed. The other day our daughter pointed out she had all the worlds knowledge in her pocket. She is right. With the cellphone I have I could find what I want to know about, well, anything. Apparently these ‘smart-phone’ things can track air flights, recommend restaurants, reserve hotel rooms, post on something called social-media, order lunch, and reach any other person on face of the earth whose phone number is known to user.
Unfortunately, though, even Bart Simpson has a better idea than I as to how to do any of that. Maybe if I actually ever needed to do those smart thingees I could figure out how to use the darn thing.
All I know about ‘puters was learned from our son Nathan while we ran Computer Central. Eight years later a lot of that learning has either become outdated or been forgotten. I have all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips, and don’t know how to access 10% of what’s available from a handheld device. For the record, accessing the other 90% is the only reason we had kids and grandkids.
Having come to the game when it was driven by floppy drives, do have an idea how to get some good out of my laptop. There are two things I know how to do on the laptop used to write these inane diatribes ‘to find out what I think’:
Google it! As Nathan said many times, “Google knows everything”. All you need is to ask the right question.
YouTubing for the masses! If you want to do it, hear it, or learn it, several folks have made videos about it. And, as advertised, I have an eclectic mind, so YouTube recommends a vast array of new stuff to learn.
Often wonder what my father would say about sitting at a laptop and connecting instantly with absolutely anything included in the sum of human knowledge? He wasn’t wrong about many things, but he was definitely wrong about computers. What they did have was a future. A future in which the sum of human knowledge can be carried in our daughter's pocket.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to fit a laptop into my pocket.
theNotComputerGeek!
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