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\usepackage{tabularray} % Easy tables
\usepackage[]{FiraSans} % sans-serif font; https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/firasansregular
\usepackage[]{footmisc}
\usepackage{cancel} % Cancel units in math mode
\usepackage{verbatim}
@ -172,6 +173,420 @@ If you want to donate financial support for the creation of this zine (and all t
\tableofcontents
\chapter{The Early Salad Days}
Boring, early life stuff when my world smelled like sweat and disinfectant and room temperature bologna. Feel free to skip this. I wish I could.
\section{Calculators}
Before computers were in my life, there were calculators.
These days, every kid has to have an expensive graphing calculator for school starting with middle school math. Specifically, it has to be a Texas Instruments graphing calculator, because the examples in the textbook are all described in terms of a Texas Instruments calculator.
I mean, \textit{sure} you can get your kid that Casio, which has all the same features and all the same buttons and is an order of magnitude cheaper, but you spent all that money on an expensive pre-school, and all that money on expensive tutors. Do you \textit{really} (he asked snottily) want to risk little Jimmy's chances of getting into Harvard because you were temporarily too cheap to buy the right calculator? Just buy the TI already!
\hrulefill
\textbf{Oh my, a diversion already.}
\begin{multicols}{2}
A little off track here, but this begs two questions: 1) Why is it always a TI calculator that's required, and 2) Are we teaching kids to learn math or to learn how to operate a calculator? The answer to the first question is that Texas Instruments and the Major Textbook Publishers\texttrademark{} have colluded to produce expensive books that need to be replaced every two to three years [thereby costing the school district money] and that require expensive calculators\footnote{A few years ago, I bought a scientific calculator at the \textbf{dollar store} and tested it against my very expensive TI-92. It was just as accurate as the more expensive calculator, and cheaper by two orders of magnitude. Did I mention that this is a racket? I really should do a YouTube video or blog post about this.} [thereby costing you as a parent money]. It's a racket, but that's capitalism for you.
The answer to the second question is that we are teaching kids how to use calculators. Teaching them how to do actual math would require thought on both the parts of the teachers\footnote{To be fair, a lot of teachers would like to teach kids how to do actual math. But they also need to eat and when it comes down to the difference between doing what is right and doing what pays the bills, they will do the latter. It's not their fault, really; it's just that the system does not like anybody who sticks out. Keep your head down and the worksheets graded—that's what the system rewards.} and the parts of the students, not to mention on the parts of parents and especially of administrators, who would also be required to grow a spine—and learn how to use it. Again, education in the United States has become a racket, but that's capitalism for you.
Alas.
\end{multicols}
\hrulefill
(You can probably tell what my thoughts are on the dominant economic system on planet Earth. There \textit{will} be more of that. If you're okay with that, I'm okay with that, too. If you're not okay with it and you want your money back, it's too late—I've already spent it.\footnote{But that's capitalism for you! \textit{Caveat emptor!}})
I have noticed that even little kids are required to bring little kid calculators to school with them in most of the local school districts. As I write this, the school supply buying season is coming to an end, but for the past six weeks every store was filled with school supply lists and yeah, you have to have a calculator to get into the second grade.
Ironically, the earliest calculators I can remember seeing (not getting my hands on, because they didn't belong to me) were Texas Instruments calculators. I don't remember a lot about them, but an uncle had given a pair to two of my cousins. They took a \textit{ton} of batteries, had red LEDs for outputs (meaning they glowed in the dark—you could use them in the dark if you memorized the keypad), and they were designed for students because they had a go-back-through-all-your-steps-to-see-where-you-done-screwed-up-boy function, which would be a useful feature on modern calculators to learn math, but again, we're not interested in kids actually learning how to think and do something as radical as math.
The other early calculator I remember was a Casio calculator and it was on a watch. A kid I knew for a short time had one, and even let me wear it for a while. (I wish I could remember his name, because this was a tremendous kindness on his part.) I swore that when I grew up, I would own one of these watches.
% Because this will all roll down when we add more text above
% https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions
\begin{wrapfigure}[9]{l}{0.15\textwidth}
\includegraphics[scale=0.15]{casio}
\end{wrapfigure}
I grew up and I didn't buy one of them, even though they are still available. I could never justify spending the money on what is—let's face it—just a bit of full-frontal nerdity when there were bills to pay. Nope, just could never bring myself to do it.
It's just me now, and my expenses are numerous but small, and a couple of years ago my local all-in-one-store had all their watches on sale for 40\% off, including the name brand watches. I checked—it was in stock. At \$25 bucks it was a lot, but on sale it was only \$15. I could do this! So I picked it up and looked at it lovingly, thinking about all the good times we would have together as we went forth and explored the world one simple calculation at a time.
But there was a problem. A rather large problem, actually. The print on those buttons is tiny. And my eyes are bad. I couldn't actually read any of the buttons. I use reading glasses when I'm reading or working on the computer, but I don't need them out in the wild. I could wear the watch with me everywhere, but unless I were at my desk, I wouldn't be able to actually use it.
Back on the shelf it went. I'm not going to spend money on something that is not actually useful to me.
At this point, my only hope is that maybe my eyes will get so bad that I'll need bifocals all day, every day. When that happens, will this watch be on sale for so little money ever again? I highly doubt it.
\section{Speaking of Watches, Timex Used to Make Home Computers}
My earliest memory of a computer in somebody's home is of being in an aunt's apartment, where she had a Timex Sinclair hooked up to her television.
I don't remember much about it, actually, other than it was small and sleek and very modern-looking. I do remember that I was not allowed to touch it.\footnote{This aunt bought things not because she found them useful, but because other people didn't have them and she wanted to always have a status symbol to point to. I don't remember her actually doing anything \textit{useful} with this computer.}
This is where memory gets wonky, because I remember seeing this when I was about ten years old. But according to Wikipedia, the Timex Sinclair\footnotemark was released in 1982, when I would have been 13 or 14 years old. So it's entirely possible that my memory is losing track of \textit{when} things happened, or it's possible that this aunt had some other home computer that for whatever reason my brain thinks is a Timex Sinclair. Who knows? I certainly don't, and I'll probably never find out for sure.
\footnotetext{It was called the Timex Sinclair because this was a collaboration between the Timex Corporation and the Sinclair Corporation. I imagine Sinclair handled the R\&D and manufacturing and Timex handled the marketing. If so, Timex didn't \textit{technically} make a computer, but they wanted us to think that they did. Good enough for me.}
\section{The Joy of a Trash-80}
One thing I'm quite sure about is that in seventh grade a select group of smart kids from my class were allowed to go to the local ``skills center''\footnote{This was a centralized school where eleventh and twelfth graders who definitely weren't going on to college could take classes like agriculture and welding. We used to teach these classes in each school under the guise of ``vocational education'' but somehow lost our way.} one day a week (Wednesday afternoons, as I recall) to study computers. This was the first time I'd ever laid my fingers on an actual computer keyboard.
\hrulefill
\textbf{Oh look, another diversion.}
\begin{multicols}{2}
``TRS'' actually stands for ``The Radio Shack,'' as in \textit{The Radio Shack 80}. This program had a room full of TRS-80 Model IIIs, with an integrated keyboard, and, if I recall correctly,\footnote{But I probably don't.} two integrated 5.25" floppy disk drives. I loved Radio Shack both because the first computer I was ever allowed to sink my teeth into was a Trash-80 and because for a while there in my youth, it was a tinkerer's paradise.
Those of us with fond memories of Radio Shack, and what it used to be, bristle at the memory of how it was terribly mismanaged at the end of its life. But in some weird postmodern way, Radio Shack does live on, just not as you might expect.
A brief history shall ensue:
Radio Shack was founded in 1921 by Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, two brothers who wanted to cash in on the burgeoning ham radio field. Initially successful, the company was nearly bankrupt in 1962, when it was acquired by the Tandy Corporation. If you've ever been in 4H, that name may ring a bell. Tandy was a leather goods corporation, and had been selling supplies for home leathercrafters since 1919. If you did leathercrafting as a 4H kid, chances are the introductory tool kit and all the materials you needed to make that belt or wallet, came from Tandy Leather Company.
Tandy actually ran Radio Shack fairly well until the mid 1990s, and had many electronic products with a ``Tandy'' name on them. But in 2000, they decided to drop the Tandy name altogether, and became the RadioShack (one word) Corporation. They sold the leather crafting assets to a company called The Leather Factory in the fall of that same year, and it still operates under the name of Tandy Leather. (If you're into making things from leather, you may want to look them up.)
RadioShack decided to move away from electronic supplies and electronics and focus on selling cell phones, which was a ridiculous move, since everybody else was also selling cell phones. The period from the early 2000s forward was a period of decline, both in sales and morale (not to mention much clenching of teeth by regular shoppers—I went in to buy some screws to repair a laptop and they didn't even carry metric screws at that point), and finally resulted in bankruptcy in 2015.
The name still exists, because other corporate entities bought the rights to it. So there are still RadioShack stores out there, but they're not Radio Shack. The Radio Shack that so many of knew and loved (it was my favorite store to visit at the mall when I was a teenager) is gone and will probably never come back. I mourn the Radio Shack of my youth as I mourn a long lost lover.
\end{multicols}
\hrulefill
That Wednesday afternoon experience was a real game changer for me. It was the first time I had an opportunity to sit down at a computer for an extended period of time and actually accomplish something, rather than just tinker around with the keyboard. We could save our work on cassette tapes until next week, which meant that our projects had some permanence, although I'm certain that all those cassette tapes are either buried in the depths of a storage room somewhere at the skills center, or more likely are buried deep in a landfill somewhere.
This was the golden age for my generation for computers. These days you can buy a computer magazine and it has a CD or DVD with programs for you to try out. (Although I haven't been in a bookstore since the pandemic started, so that may have changed.) In the early 80s, computer magazines had programs \textit{printed} in them, so if you wanted to try out a program, you had to very laboriously type it in, and then spend the rest of the evening debugging it before you actually got to spend the last 15 minutes before bedtime playing around with it.
Some of the TRS-80s did have disk drives. But these were 5.25" floppy drives, not the 3.5" floppies in the hard plastic case. (Heck, we even had a CP/M machine with an 8" floppy drive, if I remember correctly.) You had to load TRS-DOS from a TRS-DOS disk, and then swap it out for a disk that you were going to load a program from or save your work to. I actually remember thinking at one point that if you had a computer with six or eight of these drives stacked up, you would never have to swap out a floppy\footnote{The name of my next band—Swapping Floppies.}. You could just start it up and go and never have to worry about it.
Needless to say, when I found out about hard disk drives, my mind was blown.
And yes, in the early days, computers did not have a hard disk drive. I am writing this on a fairly ancient Asus laptop with 8GB of RAM and a 3rd generation Intel i5 chip in it. I bought it used, and the minute I got it, I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. That made it speedy, at least a lot faster than it was running Windows. But a while ago I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04, and I removed the hard drive and replaced it with a two terabyte\footnote{Did I \textit{need} 2 TB? No, I did not. But reader, I got an excellent deal on it.} SSD (solid state drive). This sucker \textit{moves}.
Twelve year old me's head probably would have exploded.
What I loved the most about working on those old TRS-80s was the sense of control that I had, at a level I had never experienced before. When you're a kid, there's a lot that is beyond your control. When you're a poor kid of color in a one-stoplight town, there even more that you can't control. You lack a lot of the agency that better-off, less brown kids have.
But for three hours every week, I could be in control. All of our programs were written in BASIC (TRS-BASIC, if I recall correctly) and if something didn't work, it was up to me to figure out what was wrong with it. There was nothing wrong with the computer, of course. It only did what I told it to do, and when I told it to do something that made no sense or that it couldn't understand it simply threw up its hands and gave me an error message. \footnote{This mindset is a good one to have, and has saved me hundreds of hours of troubleshooting things. Rather than assuming the computer is in the wrong, I generally assume that I've told it the wrong thing. What was the last thing I told it? Ah, \textit{there's} the problem. As someone who has helped numerous people with their computer problems, I can assure you that 95\% of all computer problems are either PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair) or PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer). Of the remaining problems, 4\% are 1D-10-T errors, and the last 1\% is an actual computer problem, which is usually solved just by rebooting. Such is life.}
Frustrating? Yes, it \textit{was} frustrating, until I realized that every mistake I made was also an opportunity to get better at writing code. It was an astounding amount of freedom.
That was partly because there was no textbook and no curriculum. The instructor, Fred, was always available to help, to guide, to encourage, and to answer questions, but he mainly left us to our own devices and never told which direction to go in. He left it completely up to us. He was the ultimate travel guide: pick a destination, and he would show you on the map where it was and how much water was in your way. If you needed to know how to use a kayak, he was happy to help, and he didn't care if you got carried away on a side-quest and never got to your original goal. It was a completely open learning environment and it was utterly \textit{amazing}.
Of course, such things can never last long.
I'd hoped to repeat this opportunity in the eighth grade, but it wasn't an option, and I never found out why. I imagine that somebody somewhere decided kids this young didn't need to learn anything about computers, because they were either a fad or the entire thing was just so much ``communist computer clap-trap''. (This was a very small, very conservative town, after all. More about that next time.)
So eighth grade was back to the grindstone of multiplying binomials, memorizing endless (and pointless) historical dates, and dodging bullies in the hallways. Our PE teacher was an ex-marine who began and ended each class with military drills, so the joy of IF THEN GOSUB was replaced with TEN-HUT! LEFT FACE! RIGHT FACE! MARCH! In one short summer, I had come full circle.
I wouldn't get my hands on an actual computer again until eleventh grade. But that's another story.
\chapter{The Later Salad Days}
Boring, early life stuff when my world smelled like sweat and disinfectant and room temperature bologna. Feel free to skip this. I wish I could.
\section{The Joy of Commodore 64}
The first computer I ever owned (and thus could use whenever I wanted to, provided it did not annoy the adults in the house) was a Commodore-64. (And yes, my use of this machine seemed to bug adults no end, and I have no idea why. I guess the same adults who thought it was a waste of time playing video games simply thought that a computer is another, more expensive type of video game. The lesson I learned here is to try to get some knowledge before you jump to criticism.)
The ``64'' stood for 64 kilobytes, which was the amount of memory it had. If you've never heard of a kilobyte before, and are wondering how many gigabytes that is, it's time for some math, and also introductory computer science.
Hold on. You've never heard of a \textit{kilobyte}? Wow, either we've really moved along, or I'm old, or both. Probably both. My knees hurt in the morning. Yeah, probably both.
Computers are just a series of switches. Each switch is a \textit{bit}. Eight bits make up a \textit{byte}, which is enough memory to remember a single character.\footnote{ See \href{https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/bits-bytes.html}{\texttt{https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/bits-bytes.html}} for more information.} Since each bit is just a one or a zero, there are 256 possible different characters you can record in a byte. (Mathematically, it works out to $ 2^n $ possible combinations. Since in this case $n=8$, then we have $2^8=256$ different combinations of ones and zeroes.\footnote{ To see the actual combinations, visit \href{https://user.eng.umd.edu/~nsw/chbe250/number.htm}{\texttt{https://user.eng.umd.edu/$\sim$nsw/chbe250/numbe \\ r.htm}}, and to see which characters those numbers translate to, see \href{https://www.rapidtables.com/code/text/ascii-table.html}{\texttt{https://www.rapidtables \\ .com/code/text/ascii-table.html}}.})
Time for some math, which looks like this:
\begin{scriptsize}
\begin{tabular}{r c c c c c l}
& & & & & 1~byte &= 8~bits \\
& & & 1 kb &=& 1,024 bytes &= 8,192 bits \\
& 1 MB &=& 1,024 kb &=& 1,048,576 bytes &= 8,388,608 bits \\
1 GB =& 1,024 MB &=& 1,048,576 kb &=& 1,073,741,824 bytes &= 8,589,934,592 bits
\end{tabular}
\end{scriptsize}
\bigskip
If you don't trust my math, check out \href{https://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/}{\texttt{https://www.matisse.net/bit \\ calc/}}, which is where I did this math. It's actually kind of fun, and they get bonus points for including the source code of the perl script behind this sorcery.
Anyway, I'm driving a laptop now that has 8 GB of memory in it. (And I've seriously considered upgrading it to 16 GB). A gigabyte is equal to 1,048,576 kilobytes. The math (and heck, let's use dimensional analysis because it's fun) looks like this:
\[
8\text{ \cancel{GB}} \times \frac{1,048,576 \text{ \cancel{kb}}}{1 \text{ \cancel{GB}}} \times \frac{1 \text{ Commodore 64}}{64 \text{ \cancel{kb}}} = 16,384 \text{ Commodore 64's}
\]
So the computer I'm on now has as much memory as 16,384 of the computer I had when I was 13 years old. If that doesn't seem like a lot to you, I paid \$175 for my current computer (used) in 2016, and paid \$200 (new) for a Commodore 64 in 1981. That's \$3,276,800 in 1981 dollars, which is the equivalent of \$8,651,869.50 in 2016 dollars, respectively. I didn't have three million dollars when I was thirteen, and I certainly don't have over eight million dollars now. Sadly.\footnote{Check out \href{https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1981}{\texttt{https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1981}} for the actual numbers.}
\medskip
\hrule
\medskip
\textbf{Oh look, it's a diversion}
\begin{multicols}{2}
If you've studied the metric system, you know that \textit{kilo-} is a prefix that means a ``a thousand'' and \textit{mega-} is a prefix that means ``a million.''
Hold on. (Again.)
1,024 is \textit{not} a thousand, and 1,048,576 is \textit{not} a million. For my entire life, we've just walked right past this and pretended that we didn't notice. Doing science stuff? \textit{kilo} is a 1,000 and \textit{mega} is a million. Doing computer stuff? Then \textit{kilo} means 1,000\textit{ish} and \textit{mega} means a million\textit{ish}. Move along now, nothing to see here.
That discrepancy should bug you. It bugs me, but I also have bills to pay, so when someone asks ``\textit{how much} does it bug you?'' my honest answer is that I've worked \textit{very} hard to not let it bug me all that much.
But still.
Fortunately, it also bugged the International Electrotechnical Commission (an international standards commission whose job it is to standardize things) enough so that they introduced a few new terms in 1998.\footnote{The standard is ISO/IEC 80000, section 13. This standard is all about the International System of Quantities, and if you're into that sort of thing, it is utterly \textit{fascinating} reading. I'm not being facetious here---humans measure \textit{everything}, and this document describes how we do it.} \textbf{Kibibyte} means \textit{exactly} 1,024 bytes, and not one byte more, not one byte less. \textbf{Mebibyte} is exactly 1,048,576 bytes. And so on with gibibytes, tebibytes, and pebibytes. They are all some form of $2^n$, which means they \textit{accurately} describe just how many bytes we're talking about here.
The following table is filled with much beauty:
\vspace{-12pt}
\begin{small}
\begin{align*}
1~kibibyte~(ki) &= 1,024~bytes \\
1~mebibyte~(Mi) &= 1,024^2~bytes \\
1~gibibyte~(Gi) &= 1,024^3~bytes \\
1~tebibyte~(Ti) &= 1,024^4~bytes \\
1~pebibyte~(Pi) &= 1,024^5~bytes \\
\end{align*}
\end{small}
\vspace{-12pt}
I can at last sleep soundly.
\end{multicols}
\medskip
\hrule
\medskip
Let's get back to our story.
I purchased this computer from the back of a K-Mart, in much the same way the men in the small town I grew up in went to the back of the video store to rent porn. I guess it's fair to say that I lusted after this computer (although a much different form of lust) so the comparison is apt.
\begin{wrapfigure}[]{h}{0.5\textwidth}
\vspace{-12pt}
\includegraphics{c64-scaled}
\vspace{-12pt}
\end{wrapfigure}
Unfortunately, when you bought a computer in those days you got exactly that in the box: a computer. There was no monitor, there was no disk drive, there was no printer. You just got a computer in a box with a power supply. I had scrimped and saved forever to buy this, and had fortunately also managed to save enough for a monitor, which in those days was a big, heavy cathode-ray tube device (CRT, for short). One of the selling points of the C-64 was that it was portable. You could just pick it up and take it with you. (It seems like all computers in the movies back in the day either took up entire rooms or buildings---think Hal-9000 in \textit{2001: A Space Odyssey}---or were something you could carry in your hand---think the tricorders in \textit{Star Trek}. We've never managed a happy medium.) The monitor, however, was anything \textit{but} portable. It was heavy, it was bulky, and it was fragile. Slam a lid closed on a modern laptop and everything will probably be fine. Knock a CRT off the table and it's toast. If it lands on your foot, you'll probably end up with a broken foot.
The second computer I ever owned was a Commodore 128. Whereas its predecessor only had 64 kb of memory, the C-128, as we called it, had a whopping 128 kb of memory—twice the memory for nearly the same price. While the C-64 could only run in the 1 Mhz\footnote{megahertz—a measure of a computer's computing speed} mode, the C-128 could run in 1 Mhz mode or 2 Mhz mode, but such were the demands on its resources that running in 2 Mhz mode meant the screen would go blank—it simply didn't have the power to process that fast and display that processing on the screen at the same time. For comparison, I just pulled up a cheap Lenovo laptop on Best Buy's website that has an Intel i3 processor with 8 GB of memory and a 256 GB solid state drive and is on sale for \$389. It has a clock speed of three \textit{gigahertz}.
\begin{wrapfigure}[]{l}{0.5\textwidth}
\vspace{-12pt}
\includegraphics{c128-scaled}
\vspace{-12pt}
\end{wrapfigure}
Unlike the C-64, which was round and bulky, the C-128 was slim and sleek. In fact, one of its selling points was its portability, and I recall seeing a brochure where a college student is walking around campus with one under his arm. What they left out of that illustration, of course, is his friend dragging a little red wagon with a very large and very heavy CRT monitor in it, along with an incredibly heavy power source. They were portable in theory, but not in any practical manner. But compared to a mainframe that took up an entire room or building, it was light years ahead of its time. And I \textit{felt} like that, too, like this computer was going to take me places where I would be light years ahead of where I was then.\footnote{It didn't, because you need so much more than just a computer to get ahead. You need resources, you need people who believe in what you're doing and support you, and you need people who can point you in the direction of the next step. If you don't have those things, you're not a visionary with a bright future ahead of him, you're just a nerd with a computer.}
Like I said, the laptop I am using now has 8 GB of memory, which is a lot more than 128 kb of memory. But how much more? It's difficult for most people to visualize numbers, especially when they are orders of magnitude apart, and looking at raw numbers doesn't give our brains much to latch onto. We need to \textit{visualize} these numbers, which is why I used money earlier. But because I like math and most people like food, let's visualize these numbers a different way: through food.\footnote{A\&W once tried to launch a $\nicefrac{1}{3}$ pound burger to compete with McDonald's quarter-pounder, the idea being you get more meat for the same price. But it didn't sell because people thought a third of a pound was less than a fourth of a pound. (Again, the metric system for the fucking win.) They could get $4>3$, but they couldn't understand $\nicefrac{1}{4}<\nicefrac{1}{3}$. See \href{https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions}{\texttt{https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractions}} for the full story.}
Let's assume that those 128 kb of memory are equivalent to one happy childhood meal. Maybe it's your dad cooking out on the weekend, or your Nonna making homemade meatballs, or maybe it's not a childhood meal; it's just you and your significant other sitting on the futon enjoying spaghetti Lady and the Tramp style. Pick whatever meal you love, that you think you could eat every day. That meal is the equivalent of those 128 kb of memory.
We've already established that there are 1,048,576 kilobytes in a single gigabyte. Let's do some more math.
\[
\frac{1,048,576 \text{ kb/Gb}}{128 \text{ kb/meal}} = 8,192 \text{ meals}
\]
That means that for every single gigabyte of my modern laptop's memory, you could eat that meal once a day for 8,192 days. Since there are 365 days in a year, we'll do the math again:
\[
\frac{8,192 \text{ \cancel{meals}}}{1 \text{ Gb}} \times \frac{1 \text{ \cancel{day}}}{1 \text{ \cancel{meal}}} \times \frac{1 \text{ year}}{365 \text{ \cancel{days}}} = 22.44 \text{ years/Gb}
\]
I hope you really like that meal, because you're going to be eating it every day for the next 22.44 years. Oh, but wait, that's for \textit{one} gigabyte. My laptop has eight. A bit more math tells me that you'll be eating this meal for $22.44 \times 8 = 179.6$ years. Oof, not only is it tasty, but it's also life-extending.
\section{High School Computer Class}
I went to high school in a very small,\footnote{We had one stoplight when I left there in 1990. I visited a few years ago, and they are now up to three stoplights. Progress.} very rural, very midwestern small town. My graduating class was 55 people, 51 of which actually managed to show up to graduation. (I showed up to graduation with a black eye, but that's another story for another zine. Also, our class president got on a plane the day after graduation, flew to California, and moved to a pot farm. Progress. That's the story, anyway.) We only had two high school science teachers: Mr. Fusko, who taught all the biology classes and Mr. Dick, who taught chemistry, physics, and advanced mathematics.\footnote{His real name; I'm not kidding. His first name was Joe, which means that I learned a lot of chemistry, physics, and advanced mathematics from Joe Dick. He was the nicest guy in the world, though. I can't remember the name of the math class I had with him my senior year. It was probably Finite Math, but who knows? I don't remember anything about matrices, but it damn sure wasn't an accounting class.}
Mr. Dick also taught computers.
This was the mid 1980s, and my very small, very rural, very redneck-laden high school had a computer lab. In reality, it wasn't an \textit{actual} computer lab. It was just a room where they took all the student desks out, replaced them with chairs and tables, and plopped computers on them. Our high school had been built in the 1960s, when computers took up an entire wing of a building. Nobody thought to design a classroom with more than four outlets in those days, so there were extension cords everywhere.
Still, it had computers in it, and that's what counts.
I don't know if I actually was able to take a computer class with Mr. Dick or not. I remember spending a lot of time in that room, but as a nerdy kid with a crap family and not much of a social life, it's only natural that I would have migrated here during my free time before school, after school, during lunch hour, or whenever I decided to skip class (which was often) or whenever I wasn't leading a meeting of the Millard Fillmore Fan Club.\footnote{See my other zine, \textit{just13} issue \#3 for more details} I remember that this room had a \textit{lot} of Trash-80s in it, with their dark silver metallic cases and black highlights, but it also had five or six CP/M machines in it, with their off-white cases and their neon green displays. (Does anybody remember CP/M? Does anybody remember laughter?\footnote{You may remember this from a Led Zeppelin song, but I always remember the version by \textit{Dread} Zeppelin. It's one of the few cases where I feel the cover is better than the original.}
Anyway, if I did take a computer class with Mr. Dick, it was a very pale experience compared to my seventh grade experience,\footnote{See the first issue of this zine.} because I don't remember it at all. No doubt there was a curriculum\footnote{Not a bad thing when well done, but years of teaching experience have proven to me that most curricula are largely designed to take any and all fun out of learning, to say nothing of teaching.} for the class, complete with quizzes, assignments, tests, and long lists of vocabulary to memorize. It would have been completely dreadful and I would have hated it, and would have naturally forced all remnants of it from my memory, so that I would have room for lots of terrible memories from lots of terrible jobs.
Here's the flip side though. Let's assume I \textit{didn't} have a computer class with Mr. Dick. In that case, what I have are very fond memories of a room that I should not have had access to but was welcome to. For a very narrow slice of the space-time continuum, there a place where I was welcomed and people were okay with me just wandering around and pushing buttons.\footnote{I have for a very long time wanted to write a science fiction story about an alien race who loves pushing buttons so much that they build devices that are essentially just buttons to push that do absolutely nothing. Imagine a PlayStation controller without the actual PlayStation.}
Considering the huge problem that the modern tech industry faces with inclusivity and diversity, I feel pretty lucky to have had that opportunity. We need to create more of these places. Maker spaces are becoming a thing, and I hope that they are as warm and inviting as I remember that high school computer lab to be. Tech should open a lot of doors for a lot of people who normally find themselves locked out of opportunities, but tech is \textit{expensive} and these costs are gatekeepers in too many instances.\footnote{Which is one reason that I am interested in getting a Raspberry Pi and playing around with it, but in this case, I lack time, not money.}
If Oprah were really interested in changing the world, instead of handing out cars to a few hundred members of her studio audience,\footnote{Watch it while it lasts: \href{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pviYWzu0dzk}{\texttt{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pviYWzu0dzk}}} she should be handing out Raspberry Pis and Arduinos to hundreds of thousands of poor kids. But her viewers understand cars, not Raspberry Pis and Arduinos, and Oprah does not do what is good for society, but what is good for her bottom line. (The real privilege in getting a free car from Oprah is that you are able to actually take time off from your job and your life and go to Chicago to attend a taping of her show. But nobody really thinks about \textit{that}.) \footnote{You want to know who does a lot of good for people, but doesn't make it all about herself? Dolly Parton, that's who. Dolly Parton is a saint. We truly don't deserve her. Forget Zod. Kneel before Dolly.}
It saddens me that we are now at a price point where technology should be able to transform the lives of millions of people, and free them from the situation they are in now. I know a lot of people say that kids are so much more comfortable with technology now, but this really isn't a great thing. When I was a kid, you used technology to change your life. There wasn't a lot of technology, so it basically boiled down to learning how to use an extremely slow computer to do tasks you'd rather not do, using a VCR to record shows so that you could watch them at a later time, and duplicating cassettes and creating mix-tapes. As I grew into young adulthood and started teaching, I saw kids doing exactly that.\footnote{Of course, these were the kids whose parents had the money to buy a computer and pay for access to the internet, neither of which were cheap in the early 90s.} Mix-tapes were replaced by mix-CDs. You could manipulate technology to improve your life, and when you were done, you shut if off and called it a day.
Now it's the other way around: technology manipulates you and you \textbf{can't} shut it off. Websites (I'm thinking of Amazon here, as they are the best at it, but plenty of other websites do this as well) now \textit{tell} you what you want to buy. You can buy things on subscription so that you don't have to think any more.\footnote{It can be devilishly tricky to actually unsubscribe from some of these things, to the point where it's easier just to absorb the expense (we can always get the kids vaccinated \textit{next} year) and just decide that this is how we live now.} Streaming services control what you watch or listen to. No longer can you just walk into a record store or a video store and get what you actually want. No longer will people experience the serendipity of walking into a store and finding a movie or album that becomes a huge part of their life. (I've discovered some of my favorite books that way. I truly believe certain objects just call to you.\footnote{I know that's kind of woo-woo, and I am not into a lot of woo-woo stuff. Maybe it's more just a matter of getting out of the house and walking around with our eyes open.})
People have become addicted to their phones in a way I'd never imagined possible. (If you are ahead of me at a red light, and the light turns green, but you don't go because you don't notice that the light is now green because you're looking at your phone—I \textit{will} let you know that the light is now green and you can proceed through the intersection. Believe me, you \textit{will} know.)
Advertisements are everywhere, on every app, on every streaming service.\footnote{Including mindfulness meditation apps—see the back cover.} They are constantly telling you that you need this product or this service, and it has become very difficult to screen that out, so much so that even drunk purchasing is now a substantial part of the economy.\footnote{\href{https://www.finder.com/drunk-shopping}{\texttt{https://www.finder.com/drunk-shopping}}, \href{https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-prime-territory-for-drunk-shoppers-2019-03-25}{\texttt{https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ \\ amazon-is-prime-territory-for-drunk-shoppers-2019-03-25}}, \href{https://www.techtimes.com/articles/240241/20190326/drunk-us-adults-spend-48-billion-shopping-online-and-amazon-is-so-happy-about-it.htm}{\texttt{https://www.techtim \\ es.com/articles/240241/20190326/drunk-us-adults-spend-48-billion-shopping-online-and-amazon-is-so-happy-about-it.htm}}.} Before, you had to leave your house to get manipulated into buying something, now you don't even have to leave the house. You can literally shop yourself out of house and home without ever leaving your house or your home.
What was promulgated as a potential servant, ever willing and able to come to our assistance, has now become our master. For more about this, I've created a YouTube playlist that you can watch here:
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\href{https://kjodle.info/techincharge}{\texttt{https://kjodle.info/techincharge}}
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What strikes me most about some of the videos in the the playlist I've linked above is that the emphasis on using technology is always that it will free up our time to spend time improving ourselves and relaxing. It's amazing how in many ways, we've far surpassed the technological capacities we imagined earlier, but rather than freeing up our time to improve ourselves (in true \textit{Star Trek} style), we are merely slaves to our own creations. I shudder to think how ``Hotel California'' has become a daily reality for so many of us. But do any of us really have more spare time as a result of technology today? (I would like to think that as a species we are intelligent enough to do that, but the fact there there is a patch of plastic the size of Texas floating around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean tells me otherwise. "Out of sight, out of mind" is meant to be a warning, not permission to shift blame.)
It needn't be that way, however. If more of us had been able to experience what I experienced in that seventh grade computer class, perhaps our relationship to technology today would be different. Perhaps we would realize that, like the wheel or fire, technology is a tool to help us improve our lives, not to be led around by it. Of course, look at what we've done with both wheels and fire—we are destroying each other and ourselves as well with them. Perhaps we never should have climbed down out of the trees onto the grassy savanna.
I don't know. It seems that our philosophy, or at the very least, our ethics, surrounding technology and what we do with it always lags far behind the cutting edge of that technology. If there are other species in the universe that have managed to travel faster than the speed of light, certainly they \textit{must} have come to a philosophical decision about the role of technology in their daily lives.\footnote{Which explains why we only get visited by the butt probe aliens now. All the other aliens in the universe have given up on us.}
\chapter{The Final Salad Days}
\section{College, 1986}
I went away to college in the fall of 1986. Personal computers were, as always, very much on my mind, but all I had was a Commodore 128. We were still typing papers on electric typewriters at that point, and the height of that technology was correction paper.\footnote{This was a very convenient alternative to a product called "Liquid Paper" (also called "whiteout") which was essentially paper-colored paint in a small bottle with a brush in the cap. When you made a mistake, you shook the bottle and brushed a very thin layer over the mistake. You then waited for the whiteout to dry, backed up, and typed the correct letter. The fluid contained a lot of solvent, and as this was the time of the Satanic Panic, parents were warned that their kids could be huffing whiteout. As you used the product, more and more of the solvent evaporated out of the bottle, until it eventually became a gloopy, chalky mess, meaning you could only use half of what was in the bottle—it was not very efficient. With correction paper, you just backed up to the mistake, put a bit of correction paper on top of the paper, typed the mistake again, removed the correction paper, backed up, and typed the correct letter. It was much neater, had no terrible fumes, and you didn't have Fundies chasing you down the street accusing you of being a devil-worshiping drug addict because you had a bottle of correction fluid in your pocket. (Liquid Paper was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, who also happened to be the mother of Mike Nesmith of the Monkees. The world is much smaller than we think it is.)}
We did have computers available to us, however. Our college owned two mainframe systems: a DEC-10 and a VAX 9000. As I remember, you had to go down to the basement of the science building to use them, where they had a room filled with VT100 terminals.
I wish for the life of me that I could remember this experience better. The ``computer room'' (nobody thought of it as a ``lab''—it would be many years before I heard that term applied to it) looked a lot like what one might think: a windowless basement room with concrete block walls, tile floors, fluorescent lights buzzing away like hornets overhead, and lots and lots of terminals.\footnote{There is a pdf of the VT100 manual available at \href{https://vt100.net/dec/ek-vt100-tm-002.pdf}{\texttt{https://vt100.net/dec/ek-vt100-tm-002.pdf}}. It makes for fascinating reading, assuming you are into that sort of thing.}
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People didn't really know much about these two mainframe systems, although I remember hearing the few computer people who were around praising the VAX as being far superior to the DEC-10.\footnote{A bit of internet research confirms this—the VAX line of mainframes was intended as a replacement for the DEC line of mainframes.} Everything was from the command line. If you saved a file\footnote{I tried for a few weeks to type up some of my notes from class, but quickly realized that this was pointless, as I couldn't take the digital files with me.} and wanted to print it, you had to send it to the print queue, and then go to a different room in the building where the line printer was located.
At this point, it was possible that your printout would be ready. But it was also entirely possible that it wouldn't be ready. Everything was printed on unperforated continuous feed paper that was 15 inches wide.\footnote{See the Wikipedia entry on ``continuous stationery'' to see what I'm talking about.} The problem was someone had to be there to tear off your printout after it was completed—the printers had no way of doing this automatically—figure out that it belonged to you, label it with your name, and set it on a shelf for you to pick up later.
And if nobody was there, the printer just kept printing, and someone would have to separate potentially dozens of different print jobs. If your print job was small, the person responsible could miss it and it would end up stuck on the end of someone else's print job. If the printer ran out of paper and nobody was there to replace it, your file just went into the printer memory (or somewhere into the ether if the printer's memory was full) until the paper was refilled. Printing anything was a big investment of time and energy (not to mention hope) and I will gladly take the occasional printer jam over that experience any day.
The only other remarkable thing I remember about that early college experience is that everybody had to take a basic computer course. This was a single, university-wide, 100-level course that all freshmen had to take.
I hate these sorts of things.
I get the point—computers are going to be a thing in everybody's lives, so lets make sure all our future graduates have a solid background in them. The problem is that information technology moves at a pretty rapid pace, and college students have a wide variety of backgrounds and career plans, and as a result, it's difficult to create a course like this that is in any way useful to every single student who takes it.
And I found that I knew much of the material anyway. It was held in a large lecture hall, and there wasn't really any point for the instructor to hold up a hard drive in her hand and announce ``This is a hard drive''—unless you were in the first ten rows, she could have been holding up a brick.\footnote{This is not hyperbole—drives were a lot bigger in those days.} I'm sure that what she said after that sentence was informative, but I'm also sure I already knew it.
Sometime during the third week we had an entire lecture about modems (``\textit{modem} stands for \textit{modulator-demodulator}'' I remember hearing before I dozed off\footnote{Which is true, but means absolutely nothing to anyone who just wants to get on the internet. Modems were designed to transmit digital data over analog telephone lines, and they accomplished this by \textit{modulating} a carrier wave to carry digital information before sending it, and \textit{demodulating} a received carrier wave to recreate the original digital information. I don't miss 4,800 bps speeds, but I do miss that modem login sound. Apparently other people do as well, because you can hear it at \href{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0}{\texttt{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0}}}) and I decided to just stop attending class. I showed up for the exams, rushed through them, got a C in the course, and decided to never take another computer course ever again.
I should mention that I went to college with the goal of becoming high school biology teacher. Over time, I realized how valuable this computer course was to me, because it made me realize that no matter who you are or where you are in life, any class should be valuable to you in some way, even if it's not the way the course designers intended. This course is now valuable to me because it taught me what a class should \textit{not} be. (This is a lesson that the modern educational-industrial complex has not, and will never, absorb.)
\section{Teaching Computers}
I graduated from college with a B.S. in Biology and a teaching certificate. I could not find a job teaching biology—I quickly discovered that biology teachers are a dime a dozen\footnote{This was a huge surprise to me, because all through college, whenever I told someone I was a biology major, they seemed really impressed and said something like "oh gosh, biology—that's really hard." But note—these were non-science people. If you want to study science, but don't want anything too hard, apparently biology is the default.} and chemistry teachers are about five bucks a dozen, and also that if you majored in physics with a goal of teaching high school science, you would have your choice of any teaching position you wanted.
Of course at this time (the early 90s), lots of people still wanted to be teachers (unlike now) because teachers still mostly garnered respect from the public, parents, and administrators, and teaching jobs were hard to come by (also unlike now). So I started substitute teaching and doing whatever I could to pay the bills.
I eventually managed to find a job at my old high school teaching what used to be called ``night school''\footnote{I have no idea what this is now called, or if it is even still a thing.} and what is still called ``community education''. But names are only labels and are usually irrelevant. My night school students had dropped out of a traditional high school education and were now in search of a GED\footnote{General Equivalency Degree—aka ``high school diploma in a box''.} to help their job prospects. I was there to teach them just enough Earth Science to enable them to pass the science portion of the GED exam.\footnote{There is so much that I could say here, but it is completely irrelevant to our current purpose and so belongs to an entirely different zine.}
More relevant to the purposes of this zine were the community education classes which were your basic ``Introduction to Computers'' class.
I really wish I could remember how I got this job. I would like to think that I had a very long, very detailed job interview which I simply aced, but I very much doubt it. I don't remember meeting with an administrator at all. The only person I can remember interacting with was a much pressed-upon administrative assistant named Geri. (I would not have been surprised to discover that she supplemented her income by delivering pizza on the weekends—such was the level of our funding.)
So yeah, an interview in which I was grilled about my knowledge of both computers and pedagogical theory did not happen. What probably happened was that I applied for the position teaching Earth science and submitted a paper resume written on a Commodore 128 and printed out on an Okidata dot-matrix printer, and they saw that dot-matrix printing and thought ``This guy knows how to use a computer. We should ask if he can teach our community education computer course as well.'' In fact, I'm quite sure that is what happened. Dot-matrix for the win!\footnote{I have no problems with this. Sometimes low expectations work in your favor. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.}
I don't remember much about this ``Introduction to Computers'' class. It took place in the same room my high school computer class had been in, but all the previous computers were gone and had been replaced by shiny new computers running Windows. As this was around 1992, this would have been some version of Windows 3.
What I do remember the most about this class was that the best way to teach anybody anything about computers was to maintain a completely hands-off policy. That is, if somebody asked me how to do something, rather than grab their mouse and \textit{demonstrate} how to do it, I found that it was better if I stood back, told the student to grab their mouse, and then told them where to point it and where to click. I confess this was partly laziness on my part—you can only \textit{show} someone so many times how to do something as simple as printing a file or turning the computer on before you are completely done with it.
But I discovered a wonderful thing about this: \textit{telling} is very different than \textit{showing}. When I show someone something I tend to use words like ``here,'' ``over here,'' etc. But when I \textit{tell} someone something, I have to use much more specific terms like ``upper-left hand corner'' and ``half way down''.
This meant that when I told someone how to print a file I ended up saying something like ``move your mouse\footnote{i.e., cursor. To someone who is new to computers, the two are one.} to the upper left-hand corner, find the `File' menu and click on it, and then go about half way down until you see the word `Print' and click on it.''
And this worked. My students were not familiar with a ``File'' menu, but they were familiar with the concepts of ``up,'' ``down,'' ``right,'' and ``left''. This led me to realize something that I had not been taught in college—you have to work with students where they are, rather than where you wish they were. You can't play the ``if only'' game. (``If only my students knew where the File menu is…'' Again, there is a lot more to say here, but that's an entirely different zine.)
I know that the usual dictum is ``show, don't tell''. But what's really happening here is that by \textit{telling} my students, they were then \textit{showing} themselves, and developing some muscle memory along the way.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed teaching this class, nothing good can last forever. A new Republican governor was elected and he slashed funding for community education and adult education programs. (A less-educated populace is easier to control, I guess.)\footnote{He also slashed anything that benefits anyone who isn't wealthy \textit{and} white \textit{and} male. (Mathematically, that would be $wealthy \land white \land male$, with emphasis on the \textit{and}.) To this day I would pay good money (i.e., beer money) to buy him a one-way ticket to Planet Fuck-Yourself-Up-The-Ass-With-A-Sharp-Stick.} I taught this course for a year, had a great time, and would gladly teach it again, even with the miserable wages. Hell, I'd do it now as a volunteer. Knowledge should be shared, not horded and sold.
\chapter{The Final Salad Days}
\section{College, 2008}
Bush II decided to tank the economy for ordinary people so that rich people could get richer.\footnote{This is the second of three "once in a lifetime" recessions I have lived through. Yay, capitalism! The rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer.} I decided to go back into teaching (which, thanks to current conservative political policies\footnote{Along with the asshole behavior of parents who approve of those policies.} there will always be a demand for), which meant I needed to go back to college to renew my teaching license. But this is a whole other story for which I have run out of space (not to mention it has very little to do with Linux or even computers), so it will have to go in a different zine if I ever decide to write it down.
What I can say is that the first time around, I wanted to get a biology major and an English minor because I wanted to teach biology and English, and I thought (naively) that this was how things worked—you pick a major and a minor and you get a job teaching that major and minor.\footnote{Turns out things don't work this way. Who knew? (You know who knew? Paul McCartney. ``I look around me and I see it isn't so.'' I guess I failed to look around me.)} But my biology advisor, a man who was many decades if not centuries my senior, advised against that plan. He felt that it would make me unhireable because it would look like I could not make up my mind between biology and English.
I did not realize it at the time,\footnote{I may not have realized it until just \textit{now}, when I wrote this.} but he was revealing his prejudice as a Biology professor. He was wrong, ultimately (schools absolutely love it when you can teach more than one subject as it provides for a lot of flexibility in scheduling), but his argument scared me. I was going to go thousands of dollars in debt for this degree (I was not smart enough to get a full scholarship, so I had to make up the difference with grants and loans—lots and lots of loans), and if I couldn't get a job, I wouldn't be able to pay back those loans. I would be sentenced to a life of penury, which is the very thing a college degree was supposed to protect against. So I agreed with him and forgot about getting an English minor.
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\noindent{}\textbf{It's time for a diversion!}
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If you complain about being stuck in a low-paying job, people of a certain stripe tell you that you should go to college. If you do go to college and then complain about being crushed under a tremendous amount of student loan debt, those same people will then tell you that you should have gotten a job that doesn't require a college degree.
What people consistently fail to remember is that college costs have risen disproportionately compared to the rate of inflation. From 1980 to 2024, the average price to attend a four-year college full time went from just over \$10,000 a year to almost \$30,000 a year when adjusted for inflation\footnote{\kref{https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/college-tuition-inflation/}{https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/college-tuition-inflation/}}—an increase of 180\%. Whereas the state of California used to provide \textit{free} college tuition back in the day\footnote{\kref{https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed/tuition-free-college-yesterday-and-tomorrow}{https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed/tuition-free-college\\-yesterday-and-tomorrow}} it no longer does—because then-governor Ronald Reagan wanted to punish the University of California for tolerating student activism.\footnote{\kref{https://calmatters.org/explainers/cost-of-college-california/\#d6b48652-908b-4639-be19-3f09ecab02f9}{https://calmatters.org/explainers/cost-of-college-california/\#d6b48652-\\908b-4639-be19-3f09ecab02f9}}\textsuperscript{,} \footnote{For more detailed information on rising college costs, see \kref{https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year}{https://educationdata.\\org/average-cost-of-college-by-year}.} (Oh no! We've taught people how to think and now they're doing it!)
A well-educated populace is a public good and there is no humane reason why any economically successful nation should burden its youth with high levels of student loan debt. There are plenty of inhumane reasons, however, the primary one being that conservative politicians do not want a well-educated populace, as it is easier to exploit them for commercial gains if they have no idea what is happening to them. It's much easier to pin their woes on the boogeyman of ``communism'' despite the fact that they have no idea what communism actually is. Unless you have capital, capitalism is not your friend.
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His second argument was that as a prospective biology teacher, I was required to get a group science ``minor'', which is in quotation marks because it was actually 36 credit hours (the equivalent of a major) rather than the 20 credit hours typical of an actual minor. As a result, I would have little time or energy (or money!) for another minor.
There are very solid reasons I got of out teaching, but unemployment makes us do strange things—hence the decision to go back to teaching which is really the only thing I'm good at. To renew my license, I needed to get eight credit hours in ``a teachable subject'' and I decided to take a couple of English classes, as that would both meet the legal requirements and also give me a chance to read and write for credit.
As they say, things happened.
At first I signed up for two English classes. But then I thought, that's eight credit hours. If I take three more I could actually get the full minor. Why not? So a couple of English classes became an English minor, which eventually became an English major.
Becoming a biology teacher required that I take a \textit{methods} class, which is a class about…well, basically it's a class about how to \textit{be} a biology teacher. It teaches you how to plan labs and field trips, and how to do things in a safe way so that nobody gets hurt, and it covers the specifics of teaching biology that were not covered in your regular education classes.
Becoming an English teacher required that I take \textit{three} methods classes, however: one about teaching literature, another about teaching grammar, and a third about teaching writing. I remember very little about the first two. To be honest, I remember more about the graduate class I took in fairy and folk tales, because those tales evolve like living beings—which in a way they are. This was where biology and literature overlapped for me in the Venn diagram of my life.
The one thing I remember very distinctly about the writing methods course was that our capstone project had to be \textit{online}. Oh wow, I thought—I've been creating websites for a while now. But I was worried. I had been hearing about how young people were so good with technology, far better than any previous generation, in fact. I was sure whatever they came up with would just blow my feeble old school attempts out of the water.
I could not have been more wrong.
Our instructor asked how many of us had any experience creating websites. Only three of us raised our hands: a woman close to my age, a college-aged woman, and myself. Half of the rest of the class looked perplexed and the other half looked mildly panicked.
Our instructor sent the three of us into a small computer lab at the end of the classroom to start making plans while she explained to the rest of the class how to create a web site. Of course, if you leave three students alone in a room, they're not going to get any work done—they're going to sit and talk. It doesn't matter what their ages are—work is just not going to be a priority for them. We didn't work. Instead, we sat and talked about how we got here.
As it turns out, the older woman and I both had experience creating websites from scratch and the younger woman (the only one of the three of us who was still on Plan A) had once set up a forum for her gaming community using phpBB, which is not quite the same thing as setting up a website, but close enough. It's better than nothing. She also spent quite a bit of time talking about ``leetspeak'' which had somehow passed me by—perhaps because I have never been much of a gamer.\footnote{Everything I read about this makes me feel that is either something that is pretty cool or the most annoying thing in the world. I can't quite make up my mind.}
Still, this left some twenty-odd young people on the other side of that door who were utterly clueless about how to create a website, and were more than a little nervous about the prospect.
I mention all of this because it was generally assumed that young people were \textit{so} good with computers, that they were \textit{so} comfortable with computers, and why wouldn't they be? After all, they grew up with them. In fact, the term that got bounced around a lot in the education world at the time was ``digital native''. It was just assumed that young people could do anything with computers because they had grown up with them.
I had grown up with computers, too, only I did it twenty-five years before these kids did and the computers I grew up with did not have a GUI or a mouse. They made you think a little bit more than modern computers.
But it is not the presence or absence of a mouse or a GUI that makes you good with a computer. A lot of kids my age also had Commodore 64s and all they did with them was shove a cartridge in the back and play games. This in no way prepared them to know how to set up a spreadsheet in VisiCalc to balance your checkbook.\footnote{Which was one of the very first things I ever tried to do with a spreadsheet. It is not nearly as easy as one might think.}
I blame the educational industrial complex here, which I believe is where the term ``digital native'' came from. (And again, this is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism. Your main goal under capitalism is to just extract as much money as you can from the people around you, and it doesn't really matter whether you are doing the right thing or not. Your only value is determined by how much wealth you bring to the shareholders.)
Growing up with a computer in your house doesn't mean that you'll be an expert at anything and everything digital any more than growing up with a car in the driveway means you'll know how to drive it, let alone change the oil or rebuild the carburetor. It's a completely false assumption. The looks on my fellow students' faces proved that.
Still, most if not all of these other students figured it out. They created their lesson plans, they got them online, they presented a highly abbreviated form of them to the class, they got their final grade, and they moved on.
I did get mine online by doing what I'd always done—crafting html and css by hand.\footnote{Shades of \textit{The Pushcart War}! One my favorite books from my childhood that shows that resistance is most definitely not futile.} And for a while it lived in a subdomain on my website but then \textit{mobile} became the thing and I was not good at adapting sites to be mobile-friendly at that point (it's a piece of cake now\footnote{Also, there some sites that just \textit{shouldn't} be mobile-friendly. Do you really want air traffic controllers directing airplanes from their phones?}) and I also changed webhosts because I was not happy with some of the business decisions my then current webhost made and then I changed webhosts \textit{again} because the dream host I had found (WebFaction) had been purchased by GoDaddy (which is a terrible company) and I eventually found a job outside of teaching because you can only eat for so long on a substitute teacher's salary, and I've let it go by the wayside. I'm sure I still have the files on a back-up drive somewhere, so I could theoretically get it online again (and in a mobile-friendly form) if I wanted to and had a long Saturday afternoon to devote to it.
But I'm not going to be a teacher ever again, so there's no point in that. That would be looking backward, not looking forward. And I don't like to get mired in the past, despite the fact that I have spent so many of these columns talking about what a delight it was. The fact is that \textit{parts} of it were delightful and many more parts were utterly terrifying.
And if that's the past, who knows what the future holds?
Terror or delight? Either way, like my former classmates, I'm moving on.
\chapter{The Salad Days Are Over}
\section{Yesterday}