Old-School Rural Geekery

I grew up in central Maine.
I had a computer when I was 7 - in 1982.
Man, did I not ever fit in.

Insane in the membrane keyboard

There were two computers I considered my "first". One was an Atari 400 with a membrane keyboard, and a cassette tape drive. Loading from those sounded fun. CLOAD, anyone? 

I absolutely loved messing around with the computer. There were a few games that were available. I played "Snooper Troopers" and "In Search of the Most Amazing Thing" from long-defunct Spinnaker Software. Those were great thinky games.

I loved the "click" the keyboard made.

Two whole games, oddly enough, did not satisfy this naturally curious mind. My uncle, who handed down the computer - an IBM PC with 2, count 'em, TWO, 5.25" floppy drives. It was heavily upgraded, with a 380k memory expansion card on top of the original 128k, and mouse interface card. Sweet deal, with CGA graphics.

I'll wait while you Google most of that stuff.

There were boxes of floppies, some of which had interesting programs - written in BASIC, that I could mess with. Mess I did.

I broke so many programs. I did so incrementally, so I could go back and fix it if it became unusable. I managed to write some nifty little programs - again, which kids didn't do in the early 80's - and I had my fun.

Here's the thing - both computers were at my great-grandmother's house, but she lived next door. I would go over and ask to use the computer, and for every hour I spent on the computer I had to do different chores for her. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal, and made me get real use out of the things.

It would be several years before people commented on how great kids were doing in learning computer skills. That would be with the advent of the Commodore 64. I never had one of those. I never needed it.

Even to this day, grow-ups are amazed at how much kids know about computers.

Not this "grown up".

When I was in high school, I had to read about the internet. The IBM PC was just plain not capable of connecting, even if there were a connection available, and the Atari had long since fried. The local college had a computer center that I could go into and practice my "skills", and I got familiar with command-line internet. There were "chat rooms", or "talkers", one could log into if you knew the address. TELNET was how I spent my internet time, I rarely delved into HTTP, as it was too new.

I made several friends online - no one was perving for kids because kids didn't know about the net. I got kicked off campus several times - the closest thing I had to troublesome teen years.

Then the mid-nineties happened. Available tech was more and more powerful, thanks to Moore's law, and there was a thing called CompuServe. People handed me the "free" sign-on floppies, because I had a computer. I told them I couldn't connect without a modem. They invariably told me to try it out anyway. 

 I taped over the write-protect tab so I could format and use the floppies, until the 3.5" floppy became standard. That brought an abrupt end to my home computing days, for a few years. I still used what I could to write short stories. I found out I had a sense of humor! I also found out that said sense of humor was not for everyone.

AOL, GEnie and Prodigy came on the market, innundating people with "FREE" minutes of service - almost none of it connecting to the internet - they were glorified BBS - Bulletin Board Systems - with a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

When they started advertising on TV, I knew people were getting stupid. "AOL is the internet!" is a phrase I can't scrape from my brain no matter how hard I try.

Then Y2K came. That will be an entirely different post, with a lot of ranting and colorful language.

Internet is so common now, it's almost a giving, and kids have no idea how technology works, so long as they can access funny cat videos.

I'm constantly having to answer "Do you have the internet?" if I visit someone and bring my laptop. Kids say things like "They don't have internet here, can I use your computer?". I try to get them to think about it.

"If there's no internet here, how will I connect?" I ask.
"Don't you just have the internet?"

I try oh so hard to explain what the internet is. I couldn't possibly bring it with me. The child seems to get it.

"Oh.", he'll say, "Can I just download Minecraft then?"

This is a repeated conversation. How my head hasn't exploded yet, I don't know. I do have one serious point to make after all this.

Like guns or cars, information and access to it is powerful, and should be handled responsibly. Children should not have such rampant access without having to understand what it is and at least a basic understanding of how it works.