upgrading

Sometime around 1990 my school teaching colleague Rolie convinces me of the benefit of owning and operating a computer. I have my doubts, buy his old Amiga, start pecking at the keyboard, print faint copy with a dot-matrix printer.

Over years I acquire modest computers, discard them with dismay long after their use-by dates, dates that get exponentially shorter. The agony of putting those grey plastic boxes on the nature-strip is now the glee of unencumbering small rooms of cartons of e-excess: dead keyboards, bloated mice with long tails, coiled printer cables, bulky black and yellow manuals for dummies.

I manage the software: I write using Works, then Lotus, then Word; I communicate via the intricacies of Outlook; but I fail abjectly to grasp the use of the spread sheet. Suddenly I have two computers, a laptop fighting a PC for desk space, making me walk lopsided to the station.

Around 2000 I start presenting drug and alcohol education to evening audiences: plastic film on whirring light-boxes gives way to PowerPoint slides on dodgy data projectors. Newsletters I edit for my employers using Publisher morph into a full-time job as publications person. I master a narrow range of desktop publishing and graphic design skills.

As publications officer I become the default webmaster. The web designer teaches me half a dozen HTML commands and I upload daily to my employer’s website and intranet. I run workshops on how to give good PowerPoint for eager staff. Colleagues seek me out for e-advice. I know more than 90 per cent of them, still regard myself as woefully ignorant, can be smacked in the gob by a trick or tip I’ve missed for years.

 

Gradually I learn to use keyboard shortcuts but still rely mostly on the mouse. Monitors change from small grey boxes to flat black acreages. Megabytes become gigabytes become terabytes. Floppy disks become CDs become flash-drives. I learn to let go, park things on the cloud instead of my hard-drive, log in remotely to or from faraway computers.

I avoid the mobile phone until forcibly given one by my employer. I make reluctant calls, then learn to send text messages, though I never ‘message’—it isn’t a verb. In 2005 I buy an expensive palmtop, primitive ancestor to the smartphone. Five short years later a delivery truck delivers an Android smartphone to my door. I use a tiny proportion of its capability.

Steve Jobs launches his tablet. I’m captivated, sceptical. I observe users. I um and ah about the tablet, opt for a sleek Apple laptop when the time comes for my next upgrade. Despite its understated simplicity, I’m still learning how to drive my Mac 18 months later.

Today I step into the Apple store at Doncaster Shoppingtown, come out with a dent in the credit card, a glossy white box, a tablet inside that will consume me. Of that I have no doubt.

Rock on.