{"id":2167,"date":"2023-01-11T08:58:19","date_gmt":"2023-01-11T08:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/?p=2167"},"modified":"2025-01-30T07:46:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T07:46:50","slug":"computers-these-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/2023\/01\/11\/computers-these-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Computers these days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.longacre.surrey.sch.uk\/\">primary school<\/a>, in the early nineties, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tesco.com\/\">Tesco<\/a> ran a scheme called Computers for Schools. Shopping at Tesco earned <a href=\"https:\/\/waterfordwhispersnews.com\/2020\/12\/02\/local-mans-unused-tesco-computers-for-schools-voucher-now-worth-millions\/\">paper vouchers<\/a>\u00a0which were collected by local schools. When a school had collected enough vouchers, they could spend them on computer equipment.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Advert, Tesco, UK, I Must Do My Homework, Computers For Schools, 1992, 90s\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Kb0itbFEK7k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The window of time when I was in love with technology began when I was five or six years old. My primary school employed the father of one of the kids to teach us the basics on the suite of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Acorn_Computers\">Acorn computers<\/a> my school had bought using Tesco vouchers.<\/p>\n<p>The IT teacher taught us two maxims:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>It is very <strong>difficult to break a computer<\/strong>, aside from using a hammer. This teaching was designed to encourage us, as we learned the rudiments of BBC Basic or word processing, to experiment, to wonder what this button does.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computers are stupid.<\/strong> They do what humans tell them, and nothing else. If someone\u2019s machine did something unexpected and the teacher was called to investigate, the whole class would carry out a call-and-response exercise:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<blockquote><p>Mr IT: Computers are\u2026?<br \/>\n<br \/>\nClass: <em>Stupid!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I progressed from Acorn computers to Windows. At home we always had a modern PC, cast off from my father\u2019s place of work. Their tech was being upgraded annually to keep up with the demand of that field. I remember vividly the day dad came home and told us kids solemnly that this new computer had a gigabyte of memory.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Wow, Dad.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I said.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What\u2019s a gigabyte?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In preparation for my undergraduate studies, I pored over <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/\">PC World<\/a> magazine before picking out a Dell desktop, a gift from my father. I took immense care of it, and used to open up the case to add RAM, virus-check it often, and back up my work to a series of DVDs every month(!). At the start of my MSc I won a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imore.com\/back-black-remembering-high-end-macbook\">MacBook<\/a> in the <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/about-this-blog\/\">essay escapade<\/a> and became a Mac convert; I worked primarily across UNIX and Mac for the next four years. As well as the trusty MacBook I was furnished with a beautiful 27-inch iMac <em>and<\/em> a UNIX box with NVIDIA GPUs for my PhD, with thanks to the <a href=\"https:\/\/wellcome.org\/grant-funding\/schemes\/four-year-phd-programmes-studentships-basic-scientists\">Wellcome Trust<\/a> for their generous funding. Further I had access to Imperial\u2019s incredible <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imperial.ac.uk\/a-z-research\/computational-methods\/hpc\/\">High Performance Computing<\/a> service for anything my own tech could not handle &#8211; quite the privilege.<\/p>\n<p>On my first day in my first job post-PhD, the hiring manger handed me a laptop with the apology that it ran Windows 7, meaning that the company\u2019s Windows 8 upgrade was still in progress. I replied dryly that I was sorry that it was Windows at all, perhaps the first indication that corporate Erika was not going to be an authentic edition of the self. I installed emacs to do my work in R, and got hauled up by IT whose virus-scanner had picked up one of the extensions I had installed, which makes emacs keybindings work in Microsoft applications and reads to a virus scanner as a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Keystroke_logging\">keylogger<\/a>. Oops.<\/p>\n<p>Working with corporate IT is different to working with academic tech, where I had been largely left to my own devices. As the years passed I came to learn that it was in my best interests to get on with the job in hand, and that it was not my job to try to understand what was going on under the IT hood. Outside of work, I had a succession of iGadgets and was aware that I was becoming less and less <em>au fait<\/em> with how the whole thing chained together.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s not just me. <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/\">Richard<\/a> once told me \u201cyou have tech chops\u201d and that is probably still true to an extent, but I don\u2019t think <strong>Maxim Two<\/strong> holds anymore. iGadgets and their ilk now hoover data up furiously. Behind your back they mine email, social media, calendar, text messages and photos. Your friends end up tagged, your geography monitored, memories and suggestions are supplied to you unbidden. If you have had a turbulent few years involving the loss of the husband, marriage, home, career and worldview that you once treasured, this is a cruel system, worse than human memory that can blindside you with a once-familiar perfume or train station, say. No, I do not want to see a photograph of my honeymoon today, thank you very much.<\/p>\n<p>That window of time has closed, then. Yet another important aspect of my life that my perspective has changed on. Weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in primary school, in the early nineties, Tesco ran a scheme called Computers for Schools. Shopping at Tesco earned paper vouchers\u00a0which were collected by local schools. When a school had collected enough vouchers, they could spend them &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/2023\/01\/11\/computers-these-days\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191,7,4],"tags":[161,158,159,162,160],"class_list":["post-2167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging-by-candlelight","category-life","category-meta","tag-apple","tag-computers-are-stupid","tag-mac","tag-tech","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3139,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167\/revisions\/3139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/erikacule\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}