From the Smoky Lake Signal, February 2, 1983. By Lorne Taylor.

Computer Woes

Fred sits in the corner of my basement looking like an IBM reject and that is pretty well what he is. Fred's a machine, one of the earliest typesetting machines. It computes whatever you type into it and outputs it onto a roll of silverbased photographic paper that eventually becomes a newspaper. Fred's not the machine's real name. It's a T1 2149, but none of us could remember it. Not that anyone actually got to know the machine well. It was bought cheap in the bright star shiny days of expansion and in the quieter realities of today's economy it isn't needed. Nor did it ever really work well. It ran as it should but it had a design fault. It was built before the hook-up-to-a-TV-screen computer days. With this machine you could type into its keyboard and it would punch paper type with a bunch of holes in it, but you had to wait until the machine processed the tape and then you processed the silver paper before you could see your errors. Nobody, but the most meticulous of typesetters could use it. Everyone else forgot words or when distracted didn't know where they left off. It's been a dud. It makes a nice sound but it's still, for now, a dud.

My only hope is a 12 year old computer genius. There must be one or two of them in the neigbourhood that knows a serial part from a parallel one and can tell me what baum rate Fred will accept information from one of the becoming-cheaper-by-the-minute computers. That's still been my dream since the beast got shoved back into its corner beside the furnace. I've perused Radio Shack catalogues hoping they would have some easy to plug gizmo but no luck so far. The closest I've come is a Single Supply UART for $8.95. It, as my 12 year old genius that I'm still looking for will know is a "fully duplexed universal transreceiver which accepts a synchronous serial binary characters and converts to parallel format and vice versas." That's really great. What does it mean? My generation, the baby boomers, are being left farther and farther behind, because we don't know this stuff. Typically, I've yet to play Pac Man. I can't program. Basic isn't basic enough. Yet computers are now running our phones, banks, thermostats. They're even sneaking into cars. It's beyond me now. Even my uncle-in-law, an electronic genius shop teacher friend in Calgary says he's finally going to break down and get some kid to help him learn how to compute. Some day my little kids are going to come home and show me. But even they won't know what's inside the integrated circuits, the tiny chips with all the brains. nor will they know how to fix them. Replace yes, fix no.

Our generation is stuck. Someday soon everyone's going to have an antiquated Apple II or TSR 80 in their basement gathering dust. Like me they'll be just as frustrated. These new smart machines are making everyone feel dumb - real dumb.

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