March 1, 2001
Guest, speaking.
I was a guest at my daughter’s Brownie meeting tonight. The entire group was working on some of the criteria to qualify for their technology badge. Being a geek in the eyes of my wife and my two daughters apparently qualifies me to speak about computers and technology in front of a bunch of seven and eight year olds.
I’ve been collecting electronic bits of crap for a long time, so I know a zener diode from a field effect transistor. But it’s a completely different scenario explaining to a sporadically attentive jumble of kids that computers once used vacuum tubes (…you mean like how we clean the carpet?), hard drives used to be the size of small refrigerators (…didn’t the computer get cold from being in the fridge?), and that yes indeed, we really did have to “dial” a telephone.
The best comment after I explained that some of the first electronic computers were the size of a gymnasium was: “… I bet it was fun jumping on the big keyboard to type stuff into the computer!” I guess it would make perfect sense to an eight year old, someone who has never been exposed to a computer that didn’t sit on top or underneath a desk, that the input device would be built to the same scale as the room-sized computer. Most of these girls had never seen a vinyl record album or a reel to reel tape, let alone something as archaically obscure as a vacuum tube or a circuit board full of hand-woven core memory.
It was satisfying to see how much of the relatively old stuff I brought was completely new to them. In particular, the Mac Portable was a big hit, probably because mine has a trackball the size of a hamster. One reassuring note was that several girls recognized a 5.25″ floppy disk. On second thought, I probably should take that as sobering evidence of the current state of the equipment being used it their school libraries and computer labs. At the end of day, I got to show off a pile of my old junk, and everyone learned a little bit of something. Me too. I love this kind of stuff.
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