the computer and I (or me)

The Computer and I (and me?)

By David Verveer

A few weeks ago I heard somebody call his computer a machine, I couldn’t believe my ears, how can somebody be so cruel and ignorant, a computer is the man’s best friend (at least), it is his bible, his dictionary, his type writer, his mail man, his postal office, his bank, his newspaper, and I could go on like this for hours, services which man’s other best friend, the dog, never would consider to perform. It is difficult to understand how our forefathers managed without computer; they were all somehow like Robison Crusoe.

How did they help their grand children with their school work, who wrote long essays on far fetched subjects, without having a computer?

My love and hate relation with the computer started around 20 years ago, when the first table computers were sold, I passed by a new type of shop, where small boys were playing games on a computer, a black box which had to be connected to the television screen, and enabled the playing youth to write and operate somehow the screen. I thought, if such small boys know how to operate it, me, with my technical training, I will have no problems to control the beast. How wrong I was, I never managed to learn how to operate that historical phenomena, which during the years gathered dust on my desk, until a professor in computer science saw this historical master piece and requested it for his collection.

But that was not my first encounter with the computer, in my student days, we were taken to one of the first computers operated in Holland, it was stationed in a giant building, in which the temperature was kept around the 14 degrees Celsius, and I don’t know how many bites it had, but my current best friend (my computer) is at least a million times more power full.

I will not bore you with all the computers which crossed my life, from the Auto -cad (Computer Aided Drawing), IBM clones, and the newest and best computer ever sold, which when I carried it out the shop, became old fashioned and incapable of operating the new software available, needed in order to comply with the competitive work environment. Then came the Internet, that changed our world, we suddenly became part of the world, we could read newspapers from around the world, we could send and receive files from abroad, without needing to go there, in short, the globe became accessible to everybody.

In comparison with the first computer I possessed, the computers today are much more user friendly, you don’t have to be technical in order to use it, small children and elder people use it, without any hesitation, after they learned to overcome their fear for anything new. And really, the computer is a blessing for everybody, from the culinary hobbyist, to the computer game enthusiasts, from the researchers to the scientists, from teachers to pupils; everybody utilizes the computer and internet.

But coming back to my best friend, my computer, who is about 4 years old, a Pentium 3, with several up-grading and new hardware, is getting extremely slow, and incapable of keeping up with the new software available. The operating system XP will need to be replaced with Vista, which can not be installed on my computer, as it has not sufficient available memory, meaning that eventually, I have to replace it with a new best friend.

But then, what to do with my retired best friend, throw it away, after all those hours together, how heartless, and you should know, throwing it away, is also not a very simple task, if you if you take in consideration the environment, you can not burry it, as it pollutes, instead of that, it has to be recycled. But there is nobody prepared to recycle (computer recycling is not a very economical business), and in the end, my retired best friend will be stored in my study, together with several other retired computers, which I have from the past, and don’t tell me that I have to give them to schools or youth clubs, even though, Gates stated that every child will have his computer, they do not accept computers with outdated soft or hard-ware.

Come to think about it, it is easier to get rid of a human body (after dying) than a computer, you can burry it or incinerate it. With Computers, it is much more complicated, and than, this fellow called the computer “a machine”, apparently he did not read Orwell.