The Real Truth About Computers: They Crash

I used to know a lot about computers. Now I know a little about them. But the first thing I learned about computers is still true: They crash. So recently when I saw a headline saying the online auction site EBay had done just that, my reaction was, “This is news?”

When I first used a computer in 1966, I had to write my own program in Fortran. I then typed my program onto IBM cards, loaded those into a card feeder, a big clunky machine that slipped them into a card reader that recorded my program on magnetic tape that was then, finally, fed into the computer, a huge machine bigger than my parent’s two-story house.

And after considering my program for a few long minutes, the machine usually spit out an error code that said little more than, “You are an idiot. Try again.” All of this could take days. Except when the system crashed, as it often did. Then it could take weeks.

It might seem impossible but people actually used that technology to fly to the moon. Now Fortran is dead. Magnetic tape memory is little more than a memory and IBM cards are collectors’ items. Today, with a computer on my desk that is already obsolete, I own a thousand times the power that ancient behemoth had. And my current machine still crashes.

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I used to back up my work by printing out everything. The problem was, the machine let me do so much I was quickly buried in paper. So now I just make disk copies. And I try not to wonder what good those computer disks are without a computer. If my machine crashes and I can’t reboot, I’ll be left with a handful of plastic I might as well use as coasters.

This level of dependence on computers makes a lot of people nervous, like the Y2K pundits. That’s why the price on EBay stock dropped like a rock the day its computer crashed.

But without the computer that crashed, EBay would not exist. You might as well sell off your stock in General Electric every time a lightbulb burns out.

As my wife Samantha told me as the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster pulled out of the station, “It’s too late to panic. Enjoy the ride.”