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This is the store. The computer store. DAVE'S COMPUTER WORLD it's known as, a store that goes back to the beginning of the personal computer revolution, tucked away into a small town in We see all kinds in the store, because we repair them as well as building them. Old systems from the dawn of time (1980), obsolete models from 14 years ago (that's 14 computer years, which, like dog years, represent 2 years of our time), the strangely constructed commercial models that people pick up in appliance stores. Compaq, IBM, Packard Bell; well-known names constructing some of the worst-designed systems in the industry. We've always built ours with change in mind, easily added to or upgraded; some systems, like moribund animal species unable to adjust to a changing environment, have extinction built into them. How fast do things change? Every eighteen months systems double in power and capacity. The pace has held for 18 years; it may hold for eighteen more, or it may go exponential. The earliest IBM type clone systems had 64 kilobytes of memory; our usual system today leaves the store with 64 megabytes, a thousand times more. The first hard drives held 10 megabytes of stored files; the large ones today run ten gigabytes, again a thousand times larger. Operating systems have changed from arcane, typed-in formulae like “C:\>cd\123<enter>123.exe<enter>" to point and click interfaces that require no knowledge of the languages working behind the scenes. I enjoy working on systems. I've developed an empathy with computers; I can feel what they're thinking, where they are confused and where hurting. It's the only way of communicating with this alien species. The technical details you find in manuals don't relate to individual computers. A programmer can't write in enough error messages to cover all, or even most situations. If you try to read an error message literally, it will tell you nothing. Error messages have to be read as parables, clues or hints as to what the real problem is.
So, will you ever be able to understand computers? No. We, the priesthood, the hardware and software gurus, have gradually eliminated your “need to know”. You don't need to understand them. We intend to keep it that way. We are keeping secrets from you and gradually drawing power into our hands. Look at what the “Year 2000” problem has done; it has caused no real harm yet, but the salaries of COBOL programmers have shot up; they have corporations eating out of their hands. Expect more of the same as computers gradually take over every aspect of your lives. You have nothing to fear from computers; but watch out for the humans that understand them.
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My Second Television by Joanne Tolson Is watching my computer. I watch the internet go by. Where is it going? Traveling at the speed of light, Bringing the world to my door, Just like cable does, too. Shopping on the net, Instead of having to go to The mall store.
Web Prose and Coms by Joanne Tolson We all got into the LAN rover and went over to see URL. Then we drove to the address bar and got some names and numbers. Then we went looking in the crawl space for creepy crawlers in their webs which we found plenty of them. Some were small and some were as long as centipedes or longer. The next day we went to the website and web surfed. We were caught in the world wide web. It was really cool though. We walked along the shores of Fortran was playing his Unix on the beach. There were young people throwing the Cobol across the Cobol net back and forth nobody really cared who was winning. They were having a good time though. The Mac daddies strolled along the boardwalk wearing their baggies and T-shirts. There was a sort of an unwritten code that everybody knew who went there to the Virtual Offices In We're in tall buildings that lined the sky, along the shore, where MR. Intel Pentium sat at his desktop over by the windows. He has been there in that position since '95 and '98 and so on in 2000. I guess he will be there until the year XP. He has been there all along in the MS. Dos, who spends her weekends on the At the Sky Mall downtown people were on cloud nine. They shopped all day and night on their credit cards. People also visited the game rooms and played various games in which they conversed and laughed. They played for the game's sake and not just for winning; that was clearly not the only game in MR. Intel Pentium went to his 4-room apartment. He checked his PC and e-mail. Then he went to bed. The next day he went to work and MS. Dos was there answering the telephone as usual. I Am Turning Another Page by Joanne Tolson On Microsoft Word finally. Going on four years of using Word Documents, I am putting my other stories into Word Documents. Not the final stories of mine, and I will finish them along with other writing projects that have been neglected and long-forgotten, in favor of newer stories, poems, articles/essays, among other stuff I write into Word Documents. Yeah, I get ahead of myself sometimes with my stories. I like the way if I mess up on a page I can backspace and pull a sentence back in line with another sentence, especially; if I get back up to the next line at the top of a page. If somehow I have to go in and add my address and rights at the top of the page, after I save the Document. Otherwise your name will be on the heading of the document instead of the title of your work. Of course, if I go and do that before I start writing page 1, after I already saved the Word document, then I can start the first page without having to go in and rearrange the first three or four pages of manuscript all over. I save it with the title page first. That way I don't have all my Word Documents with my name on them and I know what documents they are as well. It used to be before that titling your Word Documents you would have to number them instead of naming a Word Document. I still write in notebooks and make my revisions there and sometimes vice versa. I still make revisions while typing it into Word Documents. I could do all that in one step, if I could just “Think, think”, on the computer, of course. I should have learned that in typing class, but what I just learned is keystrokes and learning to manipulate words on paper. Writing my words down in notebooks first, before committing my words to the computer screen, is how I dictate to myself. There is no better dictator of my own words than myself. Sometimes learning to do something like write on a computer or a typewriter is like osmosis. It either comes to you naturally or it doesn't. After all, we're just all molecules manipulating molecules. Like the ink on a platen is manipulated onto a newspaper, it's the process of adhesion. Both chemical and mechanical processes. Like learning, getting it to stick. Tools of the Trade Tools are supplied by software applications makers or software engineers. They come in various applications and they have buttons, but software that is installed on your PC has buttons with drop down boxes or menus, where you find tools or wizards like, for example, envelopes and labels wizards. That for me has been a remote area of exploration, as I have not as often needed them, except on rare occasions. Well you know if you print 80 labels at a time it will take a while to use them. Then I have my envelopes document, which is saved to Word documents. So it is not a process in which I have to call up a wizard again every time, just to print envelopes and labels. Well, I lost my labels document the first time around, live and learn. I am learning from technology that has been or evolved since WWII, and is new to me. It has in instances made my life easier, when all I have to do is click on a button that has a Printer Icon on it once I have entered what I desired into a folder or document I can print a hard copy of it. Technology has made life simpler when everything used to be made by hand by constant repetition of patterns or objects made from clay, wood, paper, metal, etc., that has been transformed by synthesis and chemical manipulations and alterations of composition. There is software with office applications which is the equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife… printers/scanners with all-in-one applications of the same ilk. Which makes you go “Huh?” and think, why did not someone do this before? Well, if I had the technology or could afford it, before or when it came along when I needed it, would I have been better off? I think yes and no; it would have saved me endless typing, but now I have almost nirvana-like composure. I can compose and print in a click of the mouse. Sure, I am running on older software applications, too, that work with Windows capable and compatible software programs I can utilize with other programs in a combined effort that works with other machines applications. Microsoft Word is my favorite program; it's the one I will employ the most. The beauty of it is I can delete a whole page, if I don't like it. I can change my documents to suit my purpose for whatever my writing need, or start over in a new Word Document, unlike waving a magic wand of sorts. It's a matter of pushing the right buttons to get things done, believe it or not, all bells and whistles. It works for me; now if I could just get organized. Creating in Word Documents Creating in Word Documents has reorganized the way I used to present my manuscripts. Word Documents has given my writing a new lease on life. A more polished look than I would previously have had in typing each page on typing paper. Now with Word Documents it lessens the degree of printing errors on the page and I still do make errors though, but it has helped me; however, I am human and I make mistakes. You can correct errors inline on a page because they are underlined in red, too. Just like proper names are sometimes. The beauty of a writing program like Word Documents is, if it's grammatically incorrect Spell Check will let you know. You can play around with sentence structures or ignore Spell Check underlining sentences. Sometimes when a word is underlined in red, I just have to check with my dictionary, or fiddle around with the word until the red line goes away. That sometimes does the trick. No more hackneyed manuscripts and less chance of making an error. There is still room for mistakes. I made my share typing and still do, but I learned to correct those I catch. I thought copying on a copier was the way to go until I got a computer and learned to work with Word Documents. The lights came on and it's a whole new ball game for me. Everything looks different from a new perspective. The world of technology has changed over the past 2000 years. Now man has envisioned nature being shaped in ways which nature never imagined. Man has redesigned the environment to suit his needs. Even the office environment has changed with the advent of computers and Word Documents as tools of office productivity. Of course there are different programs like Lotus, Excel, Fire Fox, etc., developed for home and office use.
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