Technophobia
Monster in a Box
You never forget something that scares you and I was terrified.
It was 1988 and what petrified me was that new computer sitting on my desk, blank monitor staring at me, daring me to fail.
It was my first, an IBM-compatible PC-clone, as we called them in those days, made by Samsung. It had an 8088 chip, about 500 kilobytes of memory and, this is why it seemed like such a modern, nearly cutting-edge machine: it had a hard drive. A 36-megabyte hard drive that just seemed huge.
The monitor was in color—two of them: amber and black. Also fairly modern was the operating system: MS-DOS 3.3. Made by Microsoft, who had just stopped spelling their name MicroSoft, it was not user-friendly, a term that did not exist in those days, nor was it easy.
And it scared me to death. The first time I turned it on, my pulse was racing, heart pounding; I was having a fight/flight response to this machine, this THING, that was now flashing its cursor at me in a vaguely threatening manner.
Help!
Clearly, I was gonna need some help. At my local Barnes & Noble, I picked up a copy of DOS for Dummies; I had the choice between getting DOS for Dummies or Computers for Dummies, as I recall. There were only a couple of Dummies books back then, not a whole section, some of them apparently written by dinosaurs.
While the book was very helpful, and the series remains highly recommended even today for any novice (though I wonder what they really know about wine or sex), I still couldn't get over the feeling that I was going to somehow "break" the computer. And this one time, I thought I'd really done it.
Let's Delete Some Files!
I noticed two files named COMMAND.COM, one in my root (top-level) folder and one in my "DOS" folder. For some reason, I decided that this was unnecessary and deleted the one in the root folder.
After that, the computer would not boot.
I made frequent backups then, as now, because I was so convinced that it was only a matter of time before I would break the computer somehow and lose everything I'd ever written with it. Today, with so much of our modern working (and home) lives revolving around the documents we have on our computers, that the thought of losing them is unbearable.
Fortunately, because this was only the most recent in a series of computer blunders I had committed, and because I had faithfully backed up all 36 megabytes of my hard drive, I was able to copy the COMMAND.COM file from a floppy disk back to my root folder. The computer was now working again and though I felt a little foolish, to my credit I had figured out the problem (me) and successfully resolved it through a little foresight and planning.
Learn & Grow
The lessons I learned that day were invaluable. I learned I was an idiot, but that was an old lesson in which I sometimes needed/need a refresher course every couple of months. I thought I had broken the computer, but it was nowhere near as fragile as I'd first assumed. The fix was relatively easy because of the recent backup, so what was I worried about?
When it comes to educating people about computers, teachers say, "Young people assimilate, while older people accommodate." We all have stories about relatives with VCRs endlessly flashing 12:00 only to be fixed by their 10-year old child.
And, there are stories about computer newbies doing strange things—my favorite is still the one about the new user talking to a computer help desk and trying to pay for their services by putting his credit card in the floppy drive slot. None of it matters. We all do dumb things at one time or another. That's called "being human".
Fear Itself
There is nothing to be afraid of. You CANNOT break the computer. If I tried to delete a critical file on my Windows XP computer today, it would just reinstall that file automatically at the next boot, protecting me from my own stupidity.
I've had many computers since that first system, at home and at work, and I've never managed to completely kill one just by using it and neither will you. Killed a keyboard recently; I didn't kill it by typing on it. I spilled a glass of Diet Coke on it. Felt pretty stupid, especially after I did it to two keyboards in one week…
Want to know more?
Updated: November 18, 2005