Introduction To and Ongoing Relationship With Computers

My first introduction to computers was as a senior in high school, I had to take a class called “Data Processing.” My mother, an advocate of women being able to support themselves with office skills, insisted I take typing, bookkeeping, and the new technology of data processing. At that time, the skill consisted of typing on a weird large keyboard and pressing an enter button that produced manila colored “punch cards” that were later fed into another big, metal machine that produced a “print out” of data. These printouts were on special “computer paper” very wide, with many small holes on either side, and green stripes. It was downright archaic when you think about it today. I also had to learn some basic programming like Fortran and Cobal and make flow charts. I never really grasped the concept of programming and used to flirt with some of the geeky computer guy types (all on the AV Squad, no doubt) to get them to do my flow charts for me. I guess I had bought into the lesson learned at my father’s knee that my feeble female mind couldn’t grasp how all these big, bad machines work. Today, I still do not care how a machine works – just that it does.

After that strange introduction, computers increasingly became an important part of my work life and life as a student and a writer. When I was in undergraduate school, at Northern Illinois University, I had two different jobs through the years – both of which involved technology. True to her word, my mother was right about office skills being valuable. They allowed me to have better jobs with more flexible hours than the kids that were stuck working in food service jobs. My first job at NIU was in the Math Department where I typed and ran off work sheets and tests for professors. Besides the wonderful, you could get high off the smell, ditto master machine, there was the Thermofax, a scary, heat-driven machine that allowed you to make dittomaster carbons from regular sheets of paper. Then, there was the monster – the Multi-lith machine – the machine made by the maybe-defunct-by-now A.B. Dick Corporation. It was a horrible, messy contraption that involved a complicated process of typing text (on an IBM Selectric) onto treated sheets of paper, coated in some kind of plastic. This sheet of paper was treated with a clear solution, then placed in the saber-toothed maw of the monster Multi-Lith. It then proceed to crank out copies of the tests, furiously spewing black in spittle as it worked. I also had to load the black ink into its hungry innards and quench its neverending thirst with water. It was a pain. I learned to wear a smock so I didn’t ruin my nice sweaters. The other student secretary and I, needless to say, called that monster machine, “The Dick” after its Maker.

In those days, the early 1980’s, Xerox-type copiers were too expensive to use for multiple copies of anything. That changed quickly, however. The Canon Corporation came up with a more cost-effective machine that was used frequently in my next departmental office job as a student secretary and research assistant for the Center for Governmental Studies. There I became invaluable by learning the art of double-sided copying to save paper (more complicated back then as there was no automatic way to do it) and learning how to type data on the new-fangled “Video Display Terminals” or VDT’s that connected to a giant main frame computer in the basement where I retrieved the familiar stacks of green-lined computer paper. The VDT’s looked a little like the early personal computer screens, and gone were the archaic punch cards, but the green papered results were the same.
That Governmental Studies job allowed me to land a position as a corporate paralegal right out of college. I wasn’t yet ready to take my English degree and teach at the time. It was 1984 and the corporate world was changing as fast as the technology. When I began, at this expensive, cutting edge firm, we had one “telecopy” operator, secretaries still had typewriters, and we had a Word Processing department. When I retired from my paralegal career, 13 years later in 1997, there was an entire department devoted to faxing documents, the Word Processing department still existed, but personal desktop computers were making their way on to everyone’s desk. Oh, and we just started using that new mode of technology called the “e-mail” which, when they realized it was safe to send legal documents this way, would prove to eliminate the “Fax Department” forever.
My mother’s insistence on typing skills did give me a more comfortable introduction to computers as I was comfortable with the materiality of the keyboard after mastering the typewriter. My love affair with the typewriter began when I first spied my mother’s imposing, heavy, iron black Underwood typewriter hiding under its plastic covering in my dad’s den. My mother had used it to practice typing after her classes at Jones Commercial High School in Chicago – coincidentally now Jones College Prep High School, the school at which I teach English. The Underwood graduated me to the IBM Selectric – which I loved for the round ball you could use to change the font sizes and styles, to desktop keyboards, to my cute notebook laptop computer that I finally purchased this year and now cannot imagine my life without it. I think too fast for the pen now and, as a writer, my laptop has become a valuable companion – almost a friend. I call her Della. Pretty blue Della.