Don’t Take Your Computer For Granted

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 12, 2024

As I zip around on my computer, downloading attachments from emails, copying them into document folders, cutting and pasting documents from one folder to another, I am constantly amazed. I mean, look how far we have come. When I was in elementary school, there was ONE student computer for the entire public school I attended. Mr. G – the sixth grade teacher who must have had some sort of tape worm as he was always walking around with HUGE sub sandwiches in his hand – was in charge of it. He wheeled it around on a giant cart and my class maybe used it a few times a year. We were allowed to go out in the hall in groups and, basically, we sort of just touched it – I kid you not – especially because it’s hard to share a computer with 6 children gathered around. My Dad, when he was first in the US Air force during Vietnam, was in charge of a massive computer at the air base before he was sent overseas. What I am doing on my computer now, my little work laptop, was done on a computer that filled a HUGE room.  I imagine it was something like a UNIVAC1050 or some such thing and he would often be called in late at night when it was having issues.



Funnily – or ironically – enough, Maria Mitchell was a computer herself.  It was her official title as she calculated the ephemeris of Venus for the US Nautical Almanac. What she did was mathematical computations – computations that took quite a bit of time and that today would take less than a second for a computer.  Her work for the Nautical Almanac also made her one of the first women to work for the US federal government.


So the next time you are zipping about your computer whether it be crunching numbers, dealing with equations, moving documents around, writing . . . remember what it was like in Maria’s day before such a thing existed – or when computers first came into more public use and took up a huge room – or many huge rooms! And give thanks for this modern marvel we all take for granted whether it be on our desk of an iPhone in hand. (Can you imagine Maria Mitchell and an iPhone?)


JNLF 


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July 31, 1883. I had two or three rich days! On Friday last I went to Holderness, N.H.. to the Asquam House; I had been asked by Mrs. T to join her party. There was at this house Mr. Whittier, Mr., and Mrs. Cartland, Professor and Mrs. Johnson, of Yale . . . The house seemed full of fine, cultivate people. We stayed two days and a half. And first of the scenery. The road up to the house is a steep hill, and at the foot of the hill it winds and turns around two lakes. The panorama is complete one hundred and eighty degrees. Beyond the lakes lie the mountains.  The Asquam House sat atop Shepard Hill and was built in 1881. A hotel, it has space for fifty guests, it was located near Squam Lake and became part of a summer enclave that developed there in the later part of the nineteenth century. Today, the area is a National Historic Landmark, but sadly, the hotel was demolished in 1948. Maria would have been familiar with these people seen here – and others I did not include – but particularly John Greenleaf Whittier who was something of a family friend. He was close to one of her younger brothers, William Forester. JNLF

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