It's Groundhog Day, and we're all living in a time loop, reliving the past over and over again until we get it right. There's actually quite a few things I'd like to go back and do over again until I get them right. But I don't want to get into that right now or you'll be bored to tears.
So long as I'm living in the past, though, I'll tell you about a story I read a long time ago that had a particularly strong impact on my very young brain.
It was 1970 or '71. I was in 1st or 2nd grade -- I really can't remember which, but thanks to my book-loving parents, like my siblings I was reading at a very high level for someone so young; by 2nd grade, I was in a special 2-person reading group reading at a 6th grade level -- and my teacher had given me a book containing a set of stories (an anthology). I don't recall any of the other stories, probably because they didn't have anything to do with science or technology, and I was completely obsessed with those subjects as a child. But there was this one story that stayed with me.
You have to remember that the story was written in the mid 60s when computers were cabinet-sized monstrosities and filled entire rooms, and were attended by teams of geeks in white lab coats, or white shirts and ties with pocket protectors (the long-haired geeks with the sandals didn't show up til '67 or '68); and the 'users' were business people who typed up punch cards or paper tapes and fed them to the machines like sacrifices and then waited for their 'jobs' to run on the 'queue' so they could then receive their 'printouts' indicating the results they of the program(s) they had run.
In this story, a young school-aged girl whose mother worked in an office somehow managed to finagle access to the computer and used it to do her math homework. Her mother had given her some rudimentary training as part of showing her daughter what she did for a living, and the girl was able to use this knowledge to complete her assignments without much effort, unlike her peers.
Unfortunately, at some point she started getting the wrong answers on her homework, so she brings her mother the homework paper which has been marked up by the teacher (in red ink, I presume) and bemoans the fact that there is obviously something wrong with the computer.
The mother informs her daughter that there is nothing wrong with the computer, but there is something wrong with her understanding of how a computer works.
As her mother explains, it soon became clear that, although the computer may be faster than a human, it is not smarter. It can only do what it is programmed to do, and if you don't know how to ask the question, or you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer.
The takeaway lesson for the young girl -- and the reader -- is that a computer is only a tool, and a tool is only as smart as the person using it.
So, in the end, the girl was properly ashamed that she had taking advantage of this wonderful, space-age tool when none of her peers had the opportunity to do so. As her mother pointed out, it was not fair. And like all good morality tales, the girl admitted her mistake and thereafter determined to learn how to do things herself (manually) before using the computer again.
This was the first time I recall coming to terms with the fact that computers are really nothing more than glorified calculators. It was a far cry from the impression given by all those silly movies we'd seen, like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Desk Set, or in those Science Fiction television shows (e.g. Star Trek, Lost In Space), where computers were magical beings with unlimited knowledge.
It was also the first time I thought perhaps it might be possible to understand how they worked. And maybe even to learn to use them.
This idea would come in very handy in the years to come...
So long as I'm living in the past, though, I'll tell you about a story I read a long time ago that had a particularly strong impact on my very young brain.
It was 1970 or '71. I was in 1st or 2nd grade -- I really can't remember which, but thanks to my book-loving parents, like my siblings I was reading at a very high level for someone so young; by 2nd grade, I was in a special 2-person reading group reading at a 6th grade level -- and my teacher had given me a book containing a set of stories (an anthology). I don't recall any of the other stories, probably because they didn't have anything to do with science or technology, and I was completely obsessed with those subjects as a child. But there was this one story that stayed with me.
You have to remember that the story was written in the mid 60s when computers were cabinet-sized monstrosities and filled entire rooms, and were attended by teams of geeks in white lab coats, or white shirts and ties with pocket protectors (the long-haired geeks with the sandals didn't show up til '67 or '68); and the 'users' were business people who typed up punch cards or paper tapes and fed them to the machines like sacrifices and then waited for their 'jobs' to run on the 'queue' so they could then receive their 'printouts' indicating the results they of the program(s) they had run.
In this story, a young school-aged girl whose mother worked in an office somehow managed to finagle access to the computer and used it to do her math homework. Her mother had given her some rudimentary training as part of showing her daughter what she did for a living, and the girl was able to use this knowledge to complete her assignments without much effort, unlike her peers.
Unfortunately, at some point she started getting the wrong answers on her homework, so she brings her mother the homework paper which has been marked up by the teacher (in red ink, I presume) and bemoans the fact that there is obviously something wrong with the computer.
The mother informs her daughter that there is nothing wrong with the computer, but there is something wrong with her understanding of how a computer works.
As her mother explains, it soon became clear that, although the computer may be faster than a human, it is not smarter. It can only do what it is programmed to do, and if you don't know how to ask the question, or you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer.
The takeaway lesson for the young girl -- and the reader -- is that a computer is only a tool, and a tool is only as smart as the person using it.
So, in the end, the girl was properly ashamed that she had taking advantage of this wonderful, space-age tool when none of her peers had the opportunity to do so. As her mother pointed out, it was not fair. And like all good morality tales, the girl admitted her mistake and thereafter determined to learn how to do things herself (manually) before using the computer again.
This was the first time I recall coming to terms with the fact that computers are really nothing more than glorified calculators. It was a far cry from the impression given by all those silly movies we'd seen, like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Desk Set, or in those Science Fiction television shows (e.g. Star Trek, Lost In Space), where computers were magical beings with unlimited knowledge.
It was also the first time I thought perhaps it might be possible to understand how they worked. And maybe even to learn to use them.
This idea would come in very handy in the years to come...
4 comments:
Wow-- that was a pretty interesting story! My stand-out childhood sci-fi short story will always be Ray Bradbury's All Summer in a Day, which makes me sad, mad and sick every time I read it. I last read it to a room full of 6th graders, and I wonder how many of them even remember it.
I couldn't have cared less about computer stuff back in the day-- my first interaction with a computer was sitting in front of a terminal in the basement of Hermitage/Moody Middle School (they changed the school's name before my 8th grade year), linked to the district office computer via a phone handset modem... the interface was a keyboard and a printer. It would type a question, I would type the answer. I was supposed to be impressed that when it asked my name, it would thereafter call me by my name. It was a pretty pointless machine in my estimation.
The one computer sci-fi story I recall that had an impact on me was one in which the protagonist was a student in a "school" where kids were hooked to computers all day as their mode of learning. Something happened that made the kid think he had failed, and was going to be sent home in disgrace, but he had actually passed a psychological test that qualified him to accompany his family to a colony on Mars.
And then there was the teddy bear story, where everybody had been genetically engineered to be small (to save resources), except the rebels, or "Nats," as they were called. The Nats escaped and went to live with a bunch of teddy bear creatures. At least that's what I recall. Ha.
Why did this blog page only come up today, April 6th on my computer. Rob, I thought you had given up posting and I really missed your posts. I will never understand computers.
Jeanne, I remember those stories, too. Bradbury's story was a heart-breaker. I had a copy of the "Nats" story in one of my science fiction anthology books. Can't remember whatever happened to it.
That computer in the basement of Hermitage/Moody is the subject of my next post -- but you'll see that in a bit.
Mom, it's just been crazy trying to find time to post things. I know you'd probably rather have an email every other day, and I try to post as often as I can, but life keeps getting in the way. These are written up as drafts on the date indicated, but I often don't get a chance to finish them til much, much later (when a sudden miraculous slice of available "free" time drops out of heaven), which is when they finally get "published". Sorry about that. I kinda want to keep them that way because I track the moment when the original idea for the post occurs to me rather than when I finally get around to finishing it.
I was too soon graduated to really get a chance to use the mainframe at Hermitage. Not that I would ever have done so. I wasn't a science buff or a math whiz. Mr. Parker made sure of that. Trick-anometry. Ugh.
My first foray into the computer world was a Winchester Drive. That's what they called it. 1986, Air Force Orientation Group. We had this box they called a Winchester Drive. I was using an IBM Selectric with a single line readout "screen" so I could type and correct my correspondence and then print it out flawlessly. That was uptown for me. Before that, I was limited by a simple electric typewriter and white-out. The WD was always a mysterious thing to me, and I never learned how to use it.
Computers in Sci Fi always had more human traits than machine, I think.
At ACU I was introduced to the MAC SE. Whoo-hoo. Jan and I even spent three grand on one of those crazy machines. She used it to create curriculum. I used one at my part-time job with a yellow pages publisher. After that, any computer I used was Windows based,
Post a Comment