The Pace of Change

I remember our household’s first computer — an Atari my son bought when he was in his early teens. That was back in the 1980s, and we were dazzled by its capabilities.

I’m kidding. It was hardly dazzling. But I messed with it too, and wrote a crude program or two. Mostly, though, it was for games, the kind with the joystick that made your hand and wrist hurt if you played too much.

In 1992 I got my first real computer. I had it built from scratch — a 386SX processor, 40 MB hard drive, and 4 MB of RAM. I could have gotten two, but the technician who built it said to go with four. “You can never have too much RAM,” he said. This machine cost $1400, and the ink-jet printer I got not long after cost $400.

After running DOS programs for awhile, I decided to install Windows. It was version 3.0 at first, and a big improvement over DOS. But now I needed a new hard drive, so I had the tech install a bigger one — 105 MB. Wow. He made the old one a slave, so I had almost 150 MB altogether.

I kept that machine until a power company transformer blew up in 1998, with the resulting power jolt rendering laughing at my prehistoric surge protector as it fried my power supply and hard drive. But providence delivered a new credit card to my mailbox one day, and I maxed it out on a new HP Pavilion at Office Depot — this one costing nearly a grand. It had Windows 98, a 4 GB hard drive, and 64 MB RAM. It was nifty.

Within a few years though it was clear that I needed more RAM, so I added another 128 MB. And up until last year it served me fairly well, albeit requiring a few reformats along the way.

But it was time to retire that ancient beast, and once again I decided to have one built from scratch. This time I would up with Windows XP, an 80 GB hard drive, CD burner, and 512 MB RAM — and I paid about half of what I paid for the old HP.

And all this in just over a decade. I’m trying to think of an analogy in another technological breakthrough, and I guess it’s like going from the Wright Brothers’ paper-clad flying machine to Lear jets in the same ten years. And it makes you wonder: what next? The pace of change is accelerating, and I’m not sure we can handle it much longer. Already the world is hopelessly dependent on computers, and one can only imagine what would happen if the entire system collapsed. I sold my last typewriter not long after getting that first computer, and now I wonder how I’d write if the power went out for good. Like John Steinbeck, maybe? With a pencil?

What the hell is a pencil anyway?

There Goes the Neighborhood

When I got my first computer back in 1992, I hadn’t even heard of the Internet. But within a couple of years I was connected to the world, thanks to an ancient version of AOL. Over the next 12 years I had dial-up service with four or five different ISPs, and two years ago I finally graduated to DSL.

I’m on my third computer now, one that I hope serves me well for at least five years — and to help safeguard my equipment, I’ve installed all the free security software I could get my hands on. I’ve got Spybot, AdAware, Spyware Blaster, AVG Free Anti-Virus, Avast Anti-Virus and Pop-Up Stopper, as well as Windows XP’s Defender and firewall. I have my browser set to prompt for cookies, and I’ve otherwise tried to maximize my security.

And yet I’m still worried. I read all the security bulletins from CNet, I download every update from Microsoft, I read every article I can find about computer security, and in general I fret. My computer is important to me — for productivity, research, and to keep me in touch with the world. Thanks to the Internet, I created this blog and I’m able to add to it regularly. Even my book collaboration is over the net, so if something goes wrong with this machine — even for a few days, I’m a little screwed.

It sucks, doesn’t it. What began as a simple, useful tool is now as dangerous as downtown Baghdad. I think of my computer as a kind of green zone, but I know that any day I might get hit by a missile of some kind.

And an article I just read on Yahoo! News didn’t help me feel better. Apparently, it’s not hackers I have to really worry about these days — it’s international crime rings. Apparently it’s some foreign Mafia that’s after my personal data, that wants to plant malware on my computer that will ultimately slow it down and corrupt the software. It’s almost as if there’s a contract out on me.

Computer security experts admit the Internet criminals seem to have the edge, and the constant flow of updates from anti-virus and other security programs bears this out. Nothing is up to date anymore. AVG is updated every day, which to me means that the bad guys are a day ahead. Woe is me if my computer gets sick before my update is downloaded.

Yeah… it sucks big time. And no one seems to know the answer. The Internet has virtually wiped out distance. In the old days, if the Mafia wanted to whack you, they pretty much needed to be on the same street as you were on. Now, they can be in Russia someplace while you’re sitting at your desk in Toledo.

It certainly changes the scope of law enforcement, and to those who repudiate the notion of a future “one world,” I say this: protest all you want — but it’s too late. So for Internet crime, maybe there needs to be some kind of international police force and court system, because as it is the neighborhood cop on the beat is no longer enough.