A Personal History of Computers

This month our monologue is written and read by Theresa Williams...enjoy!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello there, and welcome to another episode of Shouting in the Evening. Brought to you by the Scheit International Theatre Company. This month's monologue was written using the prompt word computer.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

I was born in 1962 and raised in Central California. It was about two and a half hour drive to Cupertino in the Silicon Valley, which is the home of Apple Computer. I might as well have been living on a different planet for all the difference it made to me. We were poor. My mom had a ninth grade education and my dad had a third grade education. They worked whatever jobs they could, including working out in the fields picking cotton. I actually remember being out in the fields with him with my very own little bag helping to pick cotton. My dad was injured when I was around 11. He was a farm mechanic by then, and he was working on a diesel engine that was on a block, and the block slipped, the engine slipped, and he went to catch it, and so he destroyed some of the disc in his back. It was several years before he could work again. Financial welfare didn't exist back then. Instead, what you got were commodities. Commodities were things like huge blocks of processed cheese, think Belbeda, powdered eggs, powdered milk, anything that had a long shelf life. By the time I was in my late teens, our family had recovered, financially at least, but my parents' relationship was permanently damaged. They divorced in 1980, which is the same year Apple went public. A local couple at the church I was attending, Michael and Susan, became my surrogate family after that. The first time I ever gave any real thought to personal computers was 1984. I was 22. I had just returned from a mission trip to the Philippines and Hong Kong. And I was in the local mall bookstore and I saw a book, and the title of it was The Making Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. I had been vaguely aware of computers, and had even taken a course in programming basic, which I sucked at. But personal computers? No. When I thought of the Bay Area, I thought of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and the subsequent fire that destroyed everything. I didn't think of computers or semiconductors. It was 1990 before I thought much more about personal computers. By then I had become an atheist and I had moved to Seattle in order to attend the University of Washington. I was getting my Master of Library Science degree. I was browsing computers in a small computer store, and the salesman came up to me and he pointed out the Windows operating system, and he said that this was going to be the wave of the future, not the much more common DOS at the time. And now we know he was right. I had gotten a job as a vendor in the Microsoft library in the evenings. At the time, working as a vendor was a little bit like having a permanent temporary job. Microsoft paid my boss, and then he paid us. I learned a lot during those years. Some of it was about computers. I did online searches for Microsoft employees using very expensive search services. The internet existed then, but there were no browsers, no world wide web. Instead, there were FTP addresses. It was a little bit like hide-and-seek. You had to guess which directory address might have the information you were seeking. Then you would browse down through all the folders until you hopefully found the piece of information you wanted. An employee once asked me for a picture of Beavis and Budhead for a presentation they were doing. I found it by searching FTP sites. This is my one small claim to fame. I met the man who became my husband during this time. Scott was an electrical engineer. He had started as a hardware engineer, but as software and software became more dominant, he became a software engineer. This was a process he always describes as being a hardware engineer who went soft. About 10 years ago, Michael, the husband of the couple who took me in when I was a teenager, was diagnosed with liver cancer. He was in Stanford Hospital, which is in Silicon Valley. Apparently Steve Jobs had been there when he was being treated for cancer as well. Scott and I drove down to visit, but he didn't want to sit at the hospital during Michael's surgery. I wanted to stay, but I felt like I really had to go with Scott to visit the Computer History Museum. There was an exhibit of Charles Babbage's difference machine, designed in the late eighteen forties, but not built until the nineteen nineties. It is a ginormous calculator built of 8,000 parts and weighing five tons. It is seven feet high and ten feet long. Nathan Merville, formerly of Microsoft, commissioned the second of these to be built. The first was built in London for the Science Museum there. I don't remember a whole lot more about the other exhibits. Michael's surgery was dangerous and delicate. There was a good chance he wouldn't make it. I was so conflicted. In retrospect, I wish I could have told Scott how important it was to me to be with Michael's family because I just ended up feeling like I failed everyone, including myself. Michael survived the surgery, but the cancer took him a couple of months later. I left the tech industry and libraries and became a teacher. Computers became tools to me. I used them at first to communicate with colleagues and parents. They were word processors and gradebooks. I got very good at creating PowerPoint lessons and began thinking in PowerPoints, imagining how I would design slides to convey important ideas. Eventually, computers became tools for my students as well. Our district became a one-to-one district where every student had a Chromebook. This seemed like such an amazing opportunity. There are so many fantastic websites, apps, tools that could enhance student participation and learning. They also streamlined teacher tasks and made it easier to give timely feedback. Now, several years later, I don't know what to think about computers in the classroom. Today's students don't seem to have the stamina to dig into topics. Informational websites are meant to facilitate short reads. You often don't have to read multiple sources and then synthesize a product of your own thinking. And then AI came along. Good luck getting a student to write things themselves now. I know teachers who have gone back to using books and having students handwrite their papers for that reason alone. I suppose every technology has its dark side. It took less than a hundred years for the printing press, which was used to print Bibles, to print porn. It wasn't long before social media became the dark side of technology for many students. The systems that were designed to create more connection became playgrounds of online bullies. Things we would never say face to face are said frequently in social media. America's politics also became a victim of social media's dark side. Computers were lifesavers when COVID hit, though. As teachers, we were told one afternoon to send students home with about a week's worth of lessons. It was more than six months before we were back in the classroom. I know that there was damage done to students in the shutdown, but there were also really good things. We played games like Scavenger Hunt. I would choose a letter and tell them to go find something starting with that letter. They brought it to the screen and shared it with the class. It was like a window into their lives that I had never had access to before. The Zoom chat feature also democratized conversation in a classroom that would never happen in the actual physical classroom. Students could talk all at once and everyone could see their ideas. I was teaching eleven and twelve year olds about plate tectonics that spring. I had posed a question about how an island can move over time. They had lots of ideas. Most of them thought that islands floated or were moved by waves and the tides. We had a long discussion about whether or not rocks float, etc., until one girl said, Wait, islands don't float? It was a pivotal moment for her and others in their understanding of the ocean floor and plate tectonics. Zoom was also important in my private life at that time. Right before COVID hit, I had joined a challenge to write a play a day for 30 days. At the end of the month, an international group of participants met every Sunday to read through the winning play for that day. It continued meeting every Sunday for several years. The friendships that developed during those years are still maintained today. Allie was a part of this group, and this monologue was created at her suggestion. I retired from teaching a few years ago and now live a simple life in Ireland where I avoid using computers of any kind whenever possible. In some ways I have come full circle.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Thanks go to our esteemed technical wizard Ian for sound manipulation and button wrangling. Join us again next month for another Shouting in the Evening monologue. Cheerio.