Crippling My Computer

As I write this, my cable internet is dead for the second time in less than 2 months. The first time it happened I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but I assumed it was the cable modem (wrong word, since it is not a modulator-demodulator, but oh well). It wasn’t. Turned out that the line from the back of the house, across the yard to the cable box in a neighbor’s yard had failed. Time-Warner was good enough to come out and fix it after a couple of days, once I got through the phone hell to someone who knew what they were doing.

Well, it failed again, but this time I am pretty sure of the culprit. She is lanky, and fuzzy. She whines when we shut her up in her crate and she barks in the backyard. Yes, my dog, or rather our new dog. We have a lovely old golden retriever who may be the sweetest dog of all time, but some six months ago, we got a german shepherd/border collie/aussie shepherd mix. She is a handful, and she will chew on almost anything she can get her mouth on. It seems that they did not bury the cable very deep, and she dug it up and chewed on it.

However, that is not what I came to write about. For the second time in the recent past I am without internet, and it occurred to me that my computer feels crippled without the internet. For some of you that may seem strange, but for me it does. I got started late on computers. I am now past 50, and that means that the earliest computers I remember were as big as my living room and had the name IBM on them. I remember they first hand held calculators; my dad bought one, a Bowman 10. I was past 35 when I got my first job with a computer. Amazing part of the job interview was typing up a memo and printing it. I had never sat at a computer before, but I managed it. What amazes me is that I did it better than the other applicants…which does not say much for them.

It was later that summer that I got my first computer. Remember, summer of 1996, and I had a 286 with 2mb of RAM, and two 40MB MFM hard drives. It was put together with spare parts by a friend. I learned Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 on that computer, with eventual upgrades from other friends. A year later I was working at Dell doing Tech Support. I suppose I learn quickly.

I remember signing up for a free AOL trial just to try out the internet. I remember using Netzero, back when it was still free. All of this was dial-up of course, so I didn’t spend hours at a time online. If I wasn’t actually doing anything I closed the connection. Of course, there wasn’t as much to the internet then.

Now, I sit here writing on my disconnected computer and it feels like it is only half there, when I have no MSN messenger and email, and Wikipedia, and gizmodo and a hundred other website all at my fingertips.

Just last night, I was on Dada.net downloading music and using Wikipedia and last.fm to listen to songs before I downloaded them. I would never even have thought of that ten years ago.

As a student of history, and a fan of science fiction, there is one thing that the science fiction writers of the 40s and 50s got wrong. None of them saw the personal computer. None of them saw that each of us would have huge computing power right in front of us. Most of them saw a World Wide Computer Network that we would access through a terminal, and now we half come around to the point where they are nearly right. Our computers are still very powerful, but without the knowledge of the internet at their beck and call, it feels much less powerful, almost crippled.

I guess I will go play Dragon Age for a while to remind myself that there still is a lot to my computer without the internet.