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| Home >> Index Pages >> Informational Pages >> Discount Computer Systems >> News >> Applicants of Scholarship 2008 >> |
Some Thoughts About ComputersDirectron Scholarship 2008 Essay No. 03by Marta Barlow Current School: Ashford University Intended School: Rio Salado College in Arizona Intended Major: Social Science I was standing in a checkout line the other day watching the cashier ring up my purchases. The singular thought came to mind... 'Boy, what did we do before computers?' Well, we did a lot of pencil pushing and manual labor, that's for sure! I can remember that as a young Business Management Major in the late 1970's, computers were just coming into their own. But, they were huge, complicated things that took up whole rooms, made a lot of noise, and used fancy languages like COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, etc. And, they weren't easy for the Average Joe, Post Baby Boomer (like me) to learn to use! They weren't portable, user-friendly, or convenient. My Data Processing class consisted of painstakingly writing exact formulas into the Basic language, and then dutifully sitting at the key punch machine creating stacks and stacks of precisely punched cards to be fed into the main frame computer. And all for one little measly formula? It almost seemed easier to do it on paper! You know what? I never did truly understand what I was doing. A software programmer I was not! I simply did what my instructor told me to do and the machine spit out the desired results. And it was truly amazing! At the end of every class, we got to play a game where we pretended we were landing the LEM spacecraft on the moon without crashing it. It took precisely timed maneuvers, carefully planned out firings of engine rockets, strict trajectories, etc. You know what? I crashed magnificently every time! If those Apollo astronauts had had to depend on me to get to the moon and back, they would never have made it! Today I still marvel every time a space shuttle is send up, orbits, docks with the space station, and comes home again! It's all due to computers and it's awesome! A lot has changed in the last 30-40 years in the computer industry. You just stop and think for a minute about anything that you use on a day-to-day basis and there is not much that is not produced using computers, or else operates with one. It used to be that a auto mechanic just used his tools and his knowledge of how a car or truck ran. He can't do that any more! He has to be specially trained in diagnostics, prognostics, and many other "ostics." Gone are the "under-the-hood" weekend tinkerers! I guess it's all good in the long run, considering the sophisticated, streamlined, safer world that computers have given us. Lives have been saved, time has become more efficient, things are faster and automated. Technology has given us some things that we never would have been able to do or obtain fifty years ago. But, something has become lost along the way! We've moved away from a society that was easy, quieter, more homey, more personal and caring, and into a society that is noisy, fast, impersonal, artificial, and mechanized. And I wonder... is it really, truly worth it all? Gone are many timeless arts that could be life-sustaining if the plug was suddenly pulled from our digital, electronic, computer-powered world! Would the world keep going, or would everybody die of exposure, starvation, or pollution? Do we have a backup plan? Are the very things that make life comfortable today going to be our demise and ruination someday in the not-too-distant future? These are the things that I think of almost every single day, and I am worried! Are you? References: | Directron.com College Scholarship | |
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