Be warned: this post is a long, winding personal reflection into some of my experiences with technology over the last 25 years. I hadn’t set out to make it this long, but the more I wrote, the more I remembered – so I just kept going and going.
I had a major flashback this afternoon while reading a Richard Scarry book with my daughter. Scarry is of course the author of many children’s books, most notably involving the friendly people of Busytown, including Lowly Worm, Pig Will, Pig Won’t and Mr. Frumble – who always seems to be getting himself into some sort of trouble.
But it wasn’t the story itself that lead to my flashback – we’ve read through that book numerous times over the last few years – it was one item from the book in particular that did it. For some reason neither Maddie or I had ever noticed it during the previous umpteen dozen times we’d perused the animations. Yet there it was, midway through the book, sitting there on the desk by the window, being operated by a pig, or a bear or something – it was a typewriter.
“What’s that Daddy?”
Maddie had absolutely no clue what she was looking at. “What’s that, Daddy?” she asked. And so I began to explain that typewriters were the predecessors to word processors, which were themselves the predecessor to computers, and were an old way of composing a letter or document, rather than having to write it by hand.
I explained how you would feed the paper in through the back, roll it along a cylinder until the top of the page had peaked up from the bottom, and then you’d begin to type – letters being imprinted in ink on the page one by one. But unlike computers you couldn’t just type without stopping, but would instead be prompted by a DING telling you that there were 10 characters or so remaining before you ran out of space on the line.
By this stage she’d long since started ignoring me, but I was entertaining myself – so of course I kept thinking about it.
The Humble Typewriter
I learned to type on a typewriter – this would have been around 1986 or 1987 – not a fancy electric typewriter either, but the kind where you had to send the carriage back by hand at the end of each line and the keys would constantly get stuck together and absolutely wreck the page you were working on. I remember the correction strips you’d use to mask a typo, and later the white out – and the incredible irritation of misjudging how much space you had left on a line only to run out mid-word and have to include a hyphen.
I remember moving up to an electric typewriter and exclaiming what amazing progress and innovation this was. It had an automatic carriage return and even inbuilt error correction (e.g. that’s white out in the machine), and made such an amazing hum and vibration; each keystroke would make a resounding THUD on the page and the carriage return would end with an authoritative KA-CHUNKA. It made word processing so much easier.
Enter, the PC
Then BIG changes came in my first year of high school, when I had my first typing lesson on a computer. It was an old and dusty IBM – old even by the standards of the day – with a monitor that rendered everything in a glowing dual-tone combination of a dark brown background and flickering green text. But it had a DELETE key, and you could correct errors without white out and without correction strips. I quickly learned exactly where it was by touch so I could call upon it at any moment, without losing much of the flow of what I was doing at the time.
I remember the dot matrix printers, and the merciless droning buzz of the printing process as the carriage went back and forth, back and forth, over and over again – spitting out an accordion of data or documentation that would collect in a winding mess on the desk, or even spill off onto the floor if you weren’t paying attention. And the side strips, those horrible perforated side strips – designed to give the printer something to hold onto as it pulled the paper through on a pair of studded wheels on either side. It took me years to learn the trick of getting them separated from your document without tearing the page.
The New Arrival
Eventually my family joined the computer revolution, with the arrival of an IBM clone that my uncle had built for us – running Windows 3.1. It had actual colour graphics, two disk drives – a 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch – and even more importantly it played games and had INTERNET access – via a whopping 14.4 kbps dial-up modem.
The internet thing didn’t impress me nearly as much as the gaming opportunities did, but slowly I began to experiment with the web. I even created my first email account through Yahoo!, which I continued to use for over 10 years or so before eventually ditching it for GMail.
I also tried out Yahoo! chatrooms with my friends for a stage – and had some stupid juvenile fun for a while, but eventually shifted my focus to study when high school ended and I moved on to university where I took a course on introductory computer use. It taught us about Word Processing, spreadsheets, and I believe Visual Basic as well – the latter of which I recall absolutely hating and not understanding in even the most simplistic way.
Fairly clearly, I was never cut out to be a programmer. The most successful program I ever wrote was on our Commodore 64 when I was perhaps 7 or 8 years old:
10 Print "Hello world!"
20 Goto 10
Run
To this day I have no idea what language it was, only that I could make the computer do something and that was cool; and that adding commas in different places could alter the way the text was displayed so it might be appear to cascade diagonally or even change the screen and font colour. Aside from that my programming abilities haven’t really progressed much.
By way of telemarketing…
About half-way through my degree I got a job in a small company, in what turned out to be a telemarketing gig. I quickly realised that, not only was the role nothing like what I’d expected, but that I was exceptionally bad at it, and absolutely hated the work as well. Fortunately they gave me the opportunity to try my hand at desktop publishing, and interestingly I picked that up fairly quickly and grew to be pretty good at it.
I was at this job for about 5 years and then suddenly in 2002 found myself selling everything I owned to move 10,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean to get married and live in Australia – shortly thereafter getting a job at the Educational Development and Technology Centre at UNSW as a junior, scanning bug slides and coastal geomorphology ink-die tests for hours at a time.
I had some basic computer skills at this stage, but by and large they were pretty underdeveloped. However the exposure to the academic culture, and all the innovative work that was going on around me was extremely inspiration and fueled my curiosity. So I began to observe, listen and experiment on as many things as I could, as often as I could and began to learn and improve over time.
Looking back it’s pretty amazing to me how much I’ve learned on the job at UNSW, in most cases through a direct result of self-motivated, self-directed and curiosity-fueled experimentation. It’s one of the key reasons why I put so much stock in the importance of the learner discovering their own vision, and charting their own course. That’s what happened to me. I didn’t set out for that to happen, it just did. But this is in no small way due to the nurturing culture I was immersed in – and am still immersed in to this day.
Amazing things are possible when you feel supported to explore and experiment; to try things that you really don’t know how to do, and may fail at utterly – but want to try just to see what it’s like, what it does, or just because “why the heck not.” I’m grateful to my colleagues – past and present – for helping me discover all this. I couldn’t have done it without you.
