Fears of Finger Flab in Entering Computer Age
I’m feeling rather low today. It makes me wonder how I can hold onto any standards at all.
My wife says I’m suffering from cultural lag. She says I’ve been stuck for too long on the trailing edge of the technological revolution, and coming to grips with the contemporary world is taking its emotional toll on me.
She’s absolutely correct. We recently went shopping for a home computer to write on. That’s what unraveled me. Anyone who is as reactionary as I would do well to take my advice: Don’t go shopping for a home computer unless you feel very strong that day. (P.S.: Computers are easy to write on, lots easier than typewriters. It’s selecting the right one to write on that’s tough.)
Stick with the old typewriter until you’re prepared emotionally for the ordeal. Now I don’t mean just any old typewriter. I mean a manual one with real keys on it. I mean, if you can manage it, a typewriter like mine with little beveled glass windows in its sides you can look through and see its insides. The view is emotionally stabilizing.
It’s soothing to see the long levers the keys are attached to, and the springs that keep the keys in typing position. These are real keys, when people like Smith Corona and Remington had standards. They are unlike so-called computer keys, which are little truncated plastic pyramids that hit bottom with a click like a Ping-Pong ball being bounced.
Make no mistake about it, the keys on a computer keyboard are not really keys. They’re buttons, that’s what they are.
We are in the era of the push button. And that’s one thing that makes writing on a computer so easy. Even so, buttons are not so easy as touch panels or plates you don’t have to push at all to make something happen. You simply lay your finger on the little panel, with no pressure whatsoever, and you can make something as big and heavy as an elevator cab come to you.
You hardly have to work with the fingers at all these days to activate all kinds of things, from food processors with automatic dough hooks to knead your bread to gigantic, process-color, offset printing presses. An array of buttons will do it all, from mixing the staff of life to controlling printing ink in a dozen fonts at once.
It’s all very wonderful and labor-saving and mind-boggling, but I’m wondering what it’s all doing to fingers? Will future generations find themselves suffering from flabby, weak fingers?
I’m getting into another unfamiliar depth, so I’ll leave the flabby finger problem to the experts, those digital computer people. If anybody knows about the future of digits, five on each hand, they should know. Trying to select a home computer has been complicated enough for me.
The decisions are horrendously complex. I shan’t even try to touch on them all, not even two of them. But here’s one. (You’re on your own for the rest; after all, it’s your money you’re spending.)
There’s the thorny matter of the keyboard. (Sorry, buttonboard.) Except for the order of the letters you push on, like the old typewriter keyboard, no two buttonboards are alike. They vary, whimsically, from manufacturer to manufacturer. The rest of the buttons, and, alas, even puzzling combinations of the good old letter buttons, are used to make things happen on the screen. (It’s a screen all right; they’ll try to tell you it’s a monitor).
Making things happen is called commands. The trouble is no two commands are quite the same. In real life when somebody says, “March,” you know what to do. In computer life it can be anything. For instance “Double Shift, Period,” may mean the same thing on another button board, but there it’s expressed as “Command D, Shift, Return,” with perhaps an “l” or an “a” tossed in for good measure just to show that the programmer was capable of creativity.
The point is, selecting a buttonboard alone that may suit your needs, whatever they may be, from word processing to spread sheets, is a plenty confusing business, because as far as I can see there’s little standardization.
And when there are no standards to hold onto, where are you? You just flit mindlessly from technological fad to technological fad, from computer to computer, that’s where you are. With maybe flabby fingers as your ultimate fate?
