Computers are beasts that get scarier with every new model. And even as they get smarter, they are so much more ignorant than humans.
They can do math much faster than I can, but they still haven’t learned correct grammar and spelling. And I don’t think they’ll ever be really good at knowing the difference between “for” and “four” in their spellchecker. So start with the knowledge that you probably know more than they do.
My adventures with computers began when my husband decided to buy a computer instead of a video game console to help my son’s eye-hand coördination. Despite my many objections — the primary one being that I’d never learn how to use it — we ventured into the age of technology.
Darn! No Atari in my future. I never learned more than how to put a learning cartridge in and take it out.
Our second computer was a Commodore 64. I did learn how to play a lot of games on it and started to see the possibilities. Ah, the programs that the kids and I could use to make some pretty fancy stuff — a school report on snails that had the page numbers in tiny snails at the bottom, fancy calendars, and even some custom t‑shirts. I also had a lot of programs that I found interesting but never got around to learning.
My big leap was to a PC — a Commodore Colt which was nothing like the Windows computers we have now. I took my first college class to learn what to do on the blinking C:\> prompt — a computer language called DOS. It’s so much simpler now to just click on an icon. This computer was also the reason I got into fixing computers.
After 25+ years of using and working on computers, the two things I’ve learned are that a computer probably won’t break if you’re learning to use it unless you pick it up and throw it in frustration, and that you have to keep doing things to learn how to use it.
So go ahead and explore — learning new things helps keep our minds young and leads to new adventures. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
