Technology Biography

My family purchased their first computer in 1986, which I mostly used for playing games like Reader Rabbit, Oregon Trail, Family Feud, and Jones. My mom signed the whole family up for Prodigy in 1988, which was powered by an external modem made of stone and sticks, and allowed us to send e-mails to friends and family in just a few short hours.

I was in the advanced computing class in my elementary school, in which we animated Lego’s using an Apple computer, and took private computer lessons after school. As a child, I was pretty technically savvy. I had my own camera by age four, CD playing boom box and portable CD player long before most of peers, and, of course, had access to a yellow and black display PC right in the comfort of my own home. My mom was the first person we knew to buy a bag phone (ancestor to the cell phone) in the early 90s, and we were the first family to own a video camera, which my mom bought in the mid-80s.

When I got to middle school I found more people who knew their way around computers. My class learned basic programming on PC computers, how to type, and how to use Microsoft programs. My mom bought a new computer that displayed a wider variety of colors during this time, and I switched to AOL and mastered the Internet, which wasn’t something we used on our older computer or through Prodigy.
Through all of this, my father refused to update. He never got onto the Internet (and eventually lost his e-mail address to my cat), he never watched things on the VCR, he didn’t own CDs until about 1998, and he used a manual camera from the 70s. My father was stuck in the stone age, as far as my mom and I were concerned, but no matter how much we pushed, he wouldn’t give into technology.

Then, at some point, something happened to change that. My father gained interest in the Internet and started asking me for advice. I’d come upstairs and, by applying my genius computer skills, show him how to turn his computer on and off, and how to sign-in to go on the Internet. My father was awed by the technology, and spent hours fiddling with his computer. Then, one day, his business was suddenly partially online. Then his business was only online, and he no longer relied on magazines and newspapers to advertise. Suddenly, he was learning how to create web pages using codes, he started using words that I didn’t know when he talked about computers, and he started an online news feed.

One day, I looked around and I realized that I was the last person I knew to get a cell phone, the last person to get a digital camera, the last person to join facebook, and almost the last person to get an iPod (and the people who don’t have them, don’t want them). My computer skills had somehow devolved, because I couldn’t remember how to use a Mac, write a program, or even type. All I could do on a computer is check e-mail, do some Internet searches, play a few games, and type papers. How did I go from being in the lead, to being less technically savvy than my 68 year old father? I’m not sure. But, that’s where I am today. I’m a technophobe now, and I’m behind on the latest trends in… everything. I’m usually either completely lost when I’m working with a computer, or I’ve broken the computer and have to hire a nerdy computer geek, who shakes his head and mumbles about my idiocy, to come and fix my mistakes. I’m afraid that no matter how hard I try, I will fail to learn how to use the technology that is available to me. I’d like to know how all of these things work, and I’m willing to try, but I’d be a liar if I said I was confident that I was going to understand what’s going on in class.