Laptop offers technology’s magic only dreamed of in yesteryears

Let me start by saying I am a Luddite at heart. I like my life simple and quiet, though it never really seems to work out that way.

Years ago, I avoided getting a computer for as long as possible, bowing to the dictates of modern convention only when it became apparent that my friends and neighbors would no longer respond to me just shouting over the fence, or leaving voice mail messages. I’m not technophobic; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. But I really, really didn’t want to be bothered with one more thing in my life that would need attention.

This, however, happened back in what is now the “dark ages,” when voice mail was still called leaving a message on someone’s answering machine. (Remember those quaint devices? You bought it once and never paid for the service again until the machine broke, unlike today where for about $7 a month anyone with an access code, and probably Big Brother too, can listen to your messages any time they want, which are no doubt archived for the government’s convenience as well. But I forgot, the concept of real privacy has also become quaint these days.)

So, what is now more than a decade ago, I broke down and bought a computer.

And it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The Internet, with all the instant access to information it offers, really did make up for the fact that I was beholden to yet another electronic device.

But as I said, I’m a bit of a Luddite, and I really don’t subscribe to the idea that a device that costs hundreds of dollars should become obsolete trash in just a year or two. So I was determined to make that computer last. This was what is now about 13 years ago.

And last it did, until a little over a month ago, when with no more than a whine followed by an ominous clacking noise, it likely breathed its last. No, it was not exactly the same old beast for the entire 13 years--by now it’s a bit more like Frankenstein, since the beast has three hard drives totaling a whole of 12 gigabytes of computing power. But that said, reviving this particular beast, other than to retrieve 12-plus years of personal research, would rightly be considered some form of electronic cruelty, I think. (Though whether it would be more cruel to the beast or to me is not entirely clear.)
I know there’s a whole bunch of computer nerds out there reading this thinking, “Wow, what a relic...” I know they’re laughing. But I’d also bet the vast majority of them are under 30.

Perhaps it is a product of growing up in a world where nothing seems to stay the same for more than about 15 seconds, but once I find a good tool, I want to master it and use it comfortably. I don’t see carpenters buying really expensive newly designed hammers every fifteen minutes, and I just don’t see why I should have to buy myself a “new hammer” that often either.

That said, not having a “hammer” at all is a problem. For the last bunch of weeks, everything for the newspaper has had to be written in my office out on the far side of the airport, meaning I’ve more or less been chained to my desk in between trips to my mom’s house in New Jersey. It hasn’t been fun.

This weekend I decided to put an end to the slavery to my office computer. I’d been thinking about getting a laptop computer for a while now, but I’d also been putting it off. The problem with refusing to buy a new hammer is that one loses track of what new hammers do and how they do it. So I’d been doing a little research, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to take the plunge.

But standing on the edge of that diving board, with the prod of being chained to my desk every “spare” second for even another minute, let alone another week, was great incentive.

So I headed to the Allentown fairgrounds this past weekend for one of those computer shows they hold.

It was smaller than I expected, which is a good thing, because I also misjudged what time the show closed by an hour. In the end, I had just enough time to review the goods and sellers reasonably thoroughly. Five hundred dollars later, I’ve got a laptop “hammer” that is about eight times as powerful as my old beast, is portable, reads and writes DVDs in addition to CDs and has high-speed wireless Internet capability built in—and it runs on a battery for two hours or more before it needs recharging.

None of this technology is really new any more. And again, I’m sure the under-30 crowd is laughing.

But as I write this column on my new laptop, it strikes me how many times as a kid, reading sci-fi or watching Star Trek, this technology was mentioned and we dreamed of it becoming a reality.

Cell phones are the same way. Less than half a life time ago, people talked about how cool it would be to have a “communicator” from Star Trek. Little kids “played Star Trek” and emulated other sci-fi stories the way they played cowboys and Indians in past decades.

I very specifically remember reading the book version of “The Wrath of Kahn” the summer it came out when I was a kid. The crew is on a short transport out to the Enterprise, and there’s a description of Uhura doing some programming on a portable mini computer—in other words, a laptop. At the time, I thought that was the coolest thing, at least as cool as communicators.

I wanted one.

I don’t think many of us expected to actually own these devices in our lifetimes. They were the toys of the future, of a place and time that didn’t exist, the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, in a world where telephones were still dialed manually, and one got out of one’s chair to change the channel on the television. But today, they are reality.

We don’t always realize how technology has given us things that just a decade or two or three ago would have practically been considered magic. And certainly technology has presented as many problems as it solves—it is not the magic panacea it was often made out to be. But as I write this on my new laptop, it does strike me—whatever magic we can conceive of may indeed come to pass, if we can just wait long enough.