Simply Sue: The First Computer
So how would you feel if you received a letter addressed to Dear Mrs Pigworth, or accidentally typed Dear Slut or Madman in one of your own missives? Read Sue Papworth's hilarious musings on the delights of using a computer.
When I was in my third year at university, back in the Dark Ages (well, the late sixties), the university bought a computer.
You will particularly notice that I said a computer.
They just got the one, and it was quite an event. It was the size of a family of double wardrobes, and it lived in something called The Computer House, which was a large concrete blockhouse which had to be built on a specially thick concrete raft, because if a sparrow coughed somewhere in the vicinity, it might disturb its delicate workings.
A large staff of chaps in white coats ministered to its every whim and fed it punched cards, which it ate, and cogitated long and hard.
It had about the brains of a singing birthday card. Whatever it was it could actually do – and I don’t remember that anyone ever said, we were all far too impressed simply by its being there, chugging away like something out of a sci-fi film – it hadn’t yet started to dream up excuses. Or possibly it was just keeping quiet, and what the little punched cards it kept spitting out actually meant was “TOMORROW – ZA WORLD!!!”
Because they’re trying.
I keep on hearing alarming snippets on the radio, like “Of course, soon no-one will carry money any more!” (They said that about credit cards: we were all going to shove them into little slots on petrol pumps, just south of the beer pumps in pubs and, presumably, down the ear of door-to-door salesmen…
And we’re still going about wearing holes in our pockets with handfuls of washers.)
“Instead,” the chap went on, “we’ll be doing all our banking On Line.”
Hmmm. Not if your typing’s like mine you won’t.
It doesn’t really matter if you end up typing Dear Slur or Madman on a letter, so long as you put it right before you post it off to anyone especially important (though I’ve never quite recovered from a letter some years ago addressed Dear Mrs Pigworth).
But one slip of the thumb whilst you’re plugged in to the World Wide – Whoops! and you can transfer the national debt of Alderney to your current account, and only discover later that you’ve somehow paid Emley Moor T.V.mast’s electricity bill.
Doing stuff On Line means, plugging a computer into a telephone. Or, to put it another way, adding one unreliable thing that drives you bats to another.
And the idea of computers taking over the world gets totally scary when you recall how thick they are – and how often they go AWOL. The only one with which I ever had a lasting relationship kept on saying “THIS MACHINE HAS JUST PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL ACT, AND WILL NOW SHUT DOWN” though no-one ever came along to arrest it.
And I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been trying to get something sorted out over the phone, and the character at the other end said “Sorry, we can’t do anything today, the computers are down.”
Down the pub, probably.
If you’ve met one propping up the bar at your local, let me know. You can E-mail me on Sue@Beltitwithamallet.com.
