Henrietta Hay's Column

The Information Highway covers the country like a rug. It reaches into every computer that has a modem tying it to the telephone system. And here I sit by the side of the road watching the information flow by.

I once thought I was computer literate. I've been into computers for a long time but the Information Highway has put me back into the first grade. I feel like the nine-month pregnant wife who said to her husband as they entered the hospital door, "I don't know whether I can go through with this." I am stalled by the side of the road.

I remember the first computer we had in the Library (Mesa County Public). My boss and I were completely fascinated and spent every minute we could communicating with it. We all but brought it coffee and doughnuts to keep it happy. That is, until the day when I told it to "Format", and failed to add ":b." That last little item would have told it to erase the floppy disk. But since computers are very literal and do exactly what you tell them to do, it did what I told it to do and formatted the hard disk. I realized my mistake instantly, but had to sit for a full minute and watch the little red light and listen to the whirring sound as it stripped the hard disk of everything we had so laboriously loaded on to it. When it was over and I was able to stand, I sought out my boss and asked whether he thought there might be an opening for me in the County Road Department doing manual labor. Fortunately for my ego and my career, he was a very nice man and had a sense of humor. But he never forgot it.

That computer is in a museum or the landfill today. Now the Mesa County Library System is completely computerized, as it must be to meet today's needs. It is tied by computer systems to libraries all over the country through Marmot and ACLIN and the whole Information Highway.

Meanwhile my home computer, which is barely three years old and which I love dearly, is already approaching obsolescence. It cheerfully does everything I ask of it, so I had not quite realized how out of date it is until a friend and her husband recently decided to buy a new home computer. They have found that there are so many things to consider that they need a spreadsheet to process the choices. This, I might add, is the friend who was brought kicking and screaming into the computer age, and who until very recently said, "Don't tell me anything about them except which button to push."

The first thing they did was buy a book, which might be titled, All you never really wanted to know about home computers and never bothered to ask. It defines all those esoteric words that computer buffs toss around like peanuts. Now she has hit computer overdrive and regaled me with more facts and statistics than I ever wanted to know. Her whole mental system has been re-booted. So has mine, and I thought I was the expert.

She regaled me with all her new knowledge, including the fact that the speed of the new PC runs to 60 MHz. Mine chugs along at 15. Sometimes I have to wait two or three seconds for it to do something. She told me that you must have an absolute minimum of 8 MB of memory, although most home computers on the market have only 4 and mine started with 2. In my defense, I now have 6. My grandson the gamesplayer (sic) has nearly 100. My hard drive has 40 MB. Most of the new ones have over 200. My friend gave me a long discussion of motherboards and she says she ended up dreaming she had twins. Do you really want to know all this stuff?

We won't even mention all the bells and whistles to be found in the new models. Just call me a Mouse Potato, defined by Details (a magazine) as the digital age's version of the couch potato; a person who is habitually on line or otherwise occupied at the computer.