Henrietta Hay's Column

Another baby boomer reached 50 this year and what a baby it turned out to be. ENIAC, the first electronic computer, started churning out answers in 1946. It weighed 30 tons, occupied 1800 square feet and used 18,000 standard vacuum tubes. It was not too handy a gadget to stick in your spare bedroom, but its builders had unleashed a monster that has taken over the world.

My dad watched transportation evolve from the horse and buggy to the automobile, to the jet airplane to a man on the moon and it took him 93 years.

I have watched computers from ENIAC to my first personal computer to the information explosion in just fifty years and it is just beginning.

My adventure with the personal computer started around 1979. My computer son had introduced me to what the big mainframes can do, and then he sent me a big paperback book called, "You Just Bought a Personal WHAT?" The cartoon on the cover shows a curious cat peering into the open carton marked, "COMPUTER."

I too wanted one of those newfangled machines that you could fit into your house without having to move the kids out. I took a deep breath and blew myself to a Radio Shack TRS 80. It opened up a whole new world. I learned Basic language, which today's programmers read about only in the history books. I have remnants of it in my office - programs written in Basic, strips of silvery paper with financial records on them. The TRS 80 is now in the same class as the horse and buggy and I suspect one may even be resting in the Smithsonian.

I was hooked - addicted. Everything about that new toy was exciting. There was a brief shining moment there when I was almost an expert. That is, I knew more about personal computers than most of my friends and co-workers. It is hard now to remember that time.

I went through several computers, each a little - actually a lot - more powerful and convenient than the last. I went through a lot of software - writing, drawing amateurish pictures, creating databases and spreadsheets, desktop publishing.

Each time I figured out something new and thought I was pretty smart, the whole computer industry exploded with new stuff. Hardware is obsolete before you unpack your unit. New software titles fill fat catalogs every month. Watching comic strip Cathy buy her first personal computer wasn't even funny. It was true.

By now my hard disk is messier than my desk and I am completely frustrated. It is all going too fast. I haven't even had time to get myself onto the infamous World Wide Web, and am in no danger of finding any pornography lurking there. As I talk to those same friends I was trying to drag into the computer world a few short years ago, I feel like a computer wuss.

I think I have gone full circle. It is time to quit trying to keep up with the Joneses and the Apples and the Microsofts and the IBMs, time to settle back and enjoy what I already know and what the computer does best for me.

Most of all, for me, the computer is an tool to process words and ideas.

It is a wonderful instrument, which exercises both sides of my aging brain, the left or logical side and the right or creative side. This awesome machine, the computer, makes the two modes almost interchangeable. It makes it so easy to perform the mechanical tasks that the mind is free to roam, think and smell the flowers. It is magic.

Michael Green in his book Zen and the art of the Macintosh, writes, "A computer can interact so delicately and precisely with the intellect that it really does become an integral part of the cognitive process -- something that no mere mechanical contrivance could ever do before. It communicates for you, to you and with you." I'll bet old Will Shakespeare would have loved it.

My dad came into the 20th century on horseback. I'll head into the 21st with a computer under my arm. We've both had a great ride.