Strictly by chance, in the early 1980s I was a student in Silicon Valley, but computers were far from my mind. I was a returning grad student in the Stanford University School of Education, concerned mainly with biology education and John Dewey’s philosophy. Slowly, though, I realized something important was happening right around me.
I had avoided math ever since high school, when the boys’ basketball coach was a very unhelpful math teacher to the sole girl in his solid geometry class. In the 1950s I even slipped through college without taking any math classes (which would be impossible today), and only as a returning student years later was I forced to study calculus and statistics. Even worse, as part of my grad work at Stanford I found myself doing a meta-analysis of hundreds of research papers. In those days we had to use a huge main-frame computer connected to small individual terminals. Hour after hour, I sat in the dark staring at a green and white screen filled with numbers and did my statistical work. (Fortunately, I soon discovered the original Adventure game, and spent a good part of my allotted computer time opening doors to secret passages, collecting keys, and avoiding trolls.)
A few of my classmates were buying the early PCs just appearing on the market. These early computers were connected to TV sets that served as monitors, had about 2K of memory, and could be laboriously programmed in BASIC. Deciding there was likely to be a future in these gadgets, I spent $2,000 on an Apple IIe and a dot-matrix printer. It was a fortune to me at the time, but I foolishly reasoned that it would be a good investment, because surely they would last a lifetime. Somehow I wrote a 300-page dissertation on the Apple, using the awkward WordStar program and storing each chapter on a floppy disk that was truly floppy. My faculty committee members complained bitterly about the difficulty of reading the dot-matrix printouts, but I was entranced by the ease of making revisions without having to pay a typist to retype the entire paper after each review.
Those early PCs seem primitive now. Today, for a few hundred dollars we can buy sleek laptops with gigabytes of memory, Wi-Fi, and webcams—machines beyond the wildest dreams of most people in the eighties. I have mixed feelings about computers, and have often been tempted to throw one out a window. Still, using the early PCs made it an exciting time to be at Stanford, and to glimpse the Information Age that was dawning.
