Feeling old

My first introduction to computers was in elementary school in 1983. Three shiny new Apple IIe's were available to a select group of handpicked students for a half hour each day. I was one of those lucky few. Despite their modest teacher's salaries, my parents had the foresight to buy one of these precious machines for our home as well. Complete with a daisy wheel printer, I used that workhorse through high school.

Unfortunately the Apple IIe was too big and cumbersome to take with me to college. So I managed just fine with an electric typewriter. Fellow students often begged to borrow my fancy schmancy typewriter which shows you just how few options there were. A computer lab had just popped up in a dorm basement. But since the internet didn't exist, computers were primarily word processing tools. And with so few computers available in the lab, you couldn't hog a machine for the length of time needed to write a paper. So really, what was the point?

At my first job, I graduated to a laptop and Lotus 1-2-3 software. I don't think we had a mouse as we used keystroke codes for opening files and formatting and such. (Anyone remember /-File-Retrieve?) EVERYTHING was done in a spreadsheet from cover letters to business plans. The internet still didn't exist nor did e-mail so we ran from floor to floor with 3.5" disks to transfer information. The only reason we needed the laptop was to upload files from a particular software program into the one centralized docking station in the building.

When I found out my next company had Excel, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Not to mention that a year after I started, we also got e-mail. Of course, only within the company so documents to external folks still required heavy use of fax machines. One of our primary software programs came with a 3" binder of codes as push button shortcuts didn't exist. This was also my first experience at travelling with a laptop. Of course it stayed in my hotel room during the day. I would go from place to place writing down information on paper and then transferring into the computer in the evenings.

In 1999, I came to my current company and a whole new world opened up. We had laptops, e-mail, color monitors, the INTERNET! My fax usage dropped from several times a day to a few times a year. Now I am completely addicted to my Crackberry Blackberry and am never more than a keystroke away from the internet.

Why do I take you on this trip down memory lane? Certainly not to date myself. It's hard to believe this evolution only spans the last 25 years. No, this diatribe was spurred by a group of MIT students who have taken over a conference room in my building for a project. While that in itself is a little strange, I can't help but notice a larger change in the conference room as I walk by. This conference room has become a veritable sea of laptops. And that made me pause to think.

Though my company is current with technology, you rarely see a single laptop in a meeting unless someone is giving a presentation. Notes are still taken by hand on pen and paper. Group discussions are first written on white boards and flip charts and later transcribed into a computer. It's certainly not the most efficient process but oddly, no one seems to question it.

Which makes me wonder: when will we begin to question it?

College students today bring their laptops to every class. Unlike me, they grew up with computers. They live on the internet. Their primary communication vehicles are digital. As this generation of graduates enters the workforce, will they conform to our pad-and-paper-ways or will we conform to theirs?

So what I'm really trying to say is...I feel old.