Technology

I have watched the birth of the PC, the Macintosh. I have used both 5 1/4 and then "upgraded" to 3 1/2 inch floppies - I remember once paying thousands of dollars for a hard drive that today, would be useless as a paper weight. I remember usenet and ftp and the bitnet. My first "email" account was on a computer science department server that I maintained for a long time - before moving to one in the college of engineering. Communicating by email was terrific (still is ...) - but often it could not do what a simple walk across the campus or a lunch can do. My network expanded - I was wonderstruck at how easy it was to have multiple authors work together on a document. I am part of a software project that has participants in Pittsburgh (CMU), Australia (Sydney), Connecticut, China - and we "talk" to each other through a "wiki" and a "subversion repository" and ofcourse email. Today we have facebook, twitter, blogs (like this one) and myspace and ... it is impossible to be everywhere and yet be productive - Websites, yes I understand - need to maintain them, visit them (I create/edit web pages for my classes all the time). Have we improved as a society by all these new tools? Well, yes - in a sense. Distance is no longer a problem - we can still communicate using the electronic media. But is that the same as say a phone - or actually visiting someone and talking about things? Not in many cases. We need to know when to use what and how. I have seen people in adjacent offices email each other multiple times instead of walking a few feet and hashing it out. Oh well ... stuff happens I suppose.

In many ways, I am a neanderthal when it comes to computers and software. I hate using Microsoft Windows - use Linux (Ubuntu) mostly - hate Microsoft Word - use Tex/LaTeX instead, gnuplot for plotting, sage/python for calculations, maple (if I have to) and so on ... I love the command line instead of GUI's ... like pine for email instead of using GUI's ... use wget/lynx and commands that most would not even recognize ... but I am able to do what i need to for my students and myself - and for the most part use freely available software instead of sending my money to some company that writes poor software ...