GUEST ESSAY: The downside to our electronic culture
22.05.12
Back in 1990, I bought my first mail order computer. It was pretty much state of the art at the time — 33 MHz with 4 megabytes of RAM and a 130 megabyte hard drive … which today would be a sad joke. It cost just over $3,300, but I was thrilled to have it and be able (in my mind anyway) to do nearly anything on the electronic horizon with it. Within weeks I had shed any vestige of the initial intimidation and was surfing the Internet (which was pretty primitive by today’s standards … mostly text-based, and the World Wide Web was just coming about).
Fast forward through the initial learning curve for the various iterations of Windows, building computers from scratch from components obtained from computer shows in Rochester, learning HTML code, designing websites, etc. … to the present.
Currently, I no longer surf the Internet for hours (or perhaps days according to my wife), website design is no longer of significant interest to me, and I no longer build computers myself — primarily because they are so inexpensive that the separate components would cost considerably more than the already (headache free) fully assembled version.
Source: MPNnow.com (blog)