I would be, by nature, a luddite, but necessity has forced technology upon me. It wasn't always this way, before 1998 I owned neither a computer or television. Leisure time was devoted to reading books, going on hikes, travel, I was never bored. But a friend at work heard of my state and took pity on me, salvaging a television from a dumpster so that I could watch a movie he recommended - "Project Grizzly". The movie was good, and the television stayed.
My brother at this time donated his old PC to me, I couldn't see the use of it, but he showed me "Diablo", and so I took it with the purest of intentions, I would do research on the internet (I'd heard a lot about it), maybe use the word processor, I had the best of intentions.
So I join the 20th century. This was not my first experience of computers by a long shot, in high school I had programmed games in basic on my Texas Instruments PC, to date myself this was the era of Intellivision, Atari, Commodore 64, the Timex Sinclair with it's full 1 K of memory for under $100.00. Girlfriends were taken to the arcade and bored for hours on end while I demonstrated my prowress on such games as Qix, Dig Dug, Defender. . . A blanket apology to all and sundry. A friend's father had purchased a Apple, complete with baud modem and games loaded on giant floppy discs, we would play games, Dungeons & Dragons type adventures that would render a vector square on the screen with descriptions beneath of the monsters and treasures one encountered. I imagined a time when not only would you get the vector square but an actual picture of the treasure or monster, my friend laughed, "You know the memory that would take?". And, of course, primitive ASCII porn downloaded through the modem, the possibilites were endless. In University I had taken courses in Fortran and Pascal, spending hours compiling programs that would iterate loops, studying Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine, Turing and his Turing machine, but computers then were used for accounting, and writing software for accountants would be as boring as becoming one.
And so it passes that it's the late 90's and I'm possessed of a full 128K ram and a telephone internet connection.
Diablo is soon defeated and the miracle of the internet proves true - almost everything you could want can be found there. And, when legitimate research grows boring and I've run out of questions to ask there prove to be abundant other diversions, games, pornography.
And marvel at how online indescretions lead to viruses, just as in real life, and soon my 128K of ram is consumed with hidden viruses and spyware conspiring to make my internet adventures as challenging as Shaw would later. But this is a seperate post, the evolution of love. . .
The PC finally past repair I'm faced with a choice - continue, as I have in the past, to ignore technology and go back to my books, the year 2000 is almost here and most of the press implies there is a strong possibility we won't survive. Y2K.
And I'm grateful, hopeful even, I can return to my books, no longer do I need to worry about being left forever behind, the technological armageddon is almost upon us, I stockpile dry and canned foods, await the millenium, imagining my survival in the new world order where all one needs is a tank of gas and a gun, a "Mad Max" wonderland where life is simple.
Computers? Who needs 'em?
Like almost everything else in the media the joys of Y2K proved imaginary. Crawling out from beneath my kitchen table January 1st, 2001, my disappointment palpable, the world still turning unchanged, promised disasters forgotten, I'm faced again with the choice - catch up with the times, or be irretrievably left behind. And so it begins, back to school with a laptop to relearn new languages, a diploma course crammed into 8 months, 3 hours a day homework, and I slowly begin to catch up. Books grow dusty in my absence, characters pace the pages awaiting my return, while my soul is slowly sucked into this abyss of technology.
I still find time to read, but far less, most of my reading (sadly) is done online. The potential of the internet, of computers, is coming to fruition, but at a price.