The Computer Revolution

I was born in 1981, at the very beginning of the Computer Revolution. I was still forming in my mother’s womb when IBM released the first personal computer. It was the year the word “internet” was coined—as a concept for the future—and it was the year Microsoft unveiled their first disk operating system. It was truly a magical time to be alive.

My dad was fascinated by the possibilities of these machines, and he busted our family’s paltry budget and purchased a state-of-the-art Amstrad computer when I was very young. Computers in the 1980s ran off of 5 ¼ inch floppy disks. The disks shrunk in size even as their storage capacities expanded, and by the early 1990s my family owned a Packard Bell computer with a 40MB hard drive. CPUs got fast—faster than anyone expected. Hard drives got massive…I remember how excited we were when we passed the gigabyte limit. Floppy disks were exchanged for CDs, which could hold nearly 20 times the data of our first hard drive. Our family purchased a subscription to the Prodigy network, and our computer could link up with others from around the world.

My lifetime parallels massive advances in technology that have made deep stitches into the fabric of society. Cellphones were the rare provenance of the extremely wealthy—hulky, glitchy apparatuses relegated to the basic functions of communication. Today, cellphones are more powerful than the most powerful computers of the 1980s, and they are ubiquitous. I recently lost my cellphone and spent several days looking for it before giving up and buying a new one; the experience reinforced how deeply dependent I have become on this new technology: When I go to a store I frequently compare products and read reviews online before making purchases. I read news from dozens of newspapers every day. I chat with friends and family, coworkers and customers. When I am going somewhere unfamiliar I always use the GPS on my phone. I don't go to a new restaurant without reading the Yelp reviews, or rent a movie without checking with Rotten Tomatoes. I seldom sit quietly with my own thoughts. . .