Vince Moore

19 SEP 02

TLC 321

Dr. Wayne Butler

Project One

You and Technology:

An Autoethnography

My generation has witnessed the growth of the personal computer almost from infancy. Most of my friends had computers in the home as children, so we have seen the technology advance leaps and bounds in our short lives. My first computer was an all-in-one Mac with a black screen with green type. In the eighth grade, I finally go the first computer that I could call my own: a Packard Bell 486 that had…gasp…a cd-rom drive! My personal computer now is more powerful and more spacious than I would have ever dreamed, and it is not even near the top of the line. The computer industry is growing exponentially; we can look where we have been and dream about where we are going.

I remember my first experiences with computers fondly. We had a Macintosh that was used at the local newspaper, which we owned. When the paper would get new computers, we took home the old ones. After a few rounds of computers that really served me no purpose, we got a Mac that had games. Now there was a point for this technology to be in my house, and I was hooked. My dad and I would play MacGolf on the computer daily. The dot-matrix appearance of the black and white screen showed the little golfer swing back and strike the ball. Splash. “Whoops!” The joys of technology. We also got into a game called Dark Castle. A man, who looked remarkably like the golfer from MacGolf, would grunt his way through the castle avoiding dungeons and rats. He would swing on ropes and chains and throw pebbles. We had other games, such as Speller Bee and Math Wiz to help educate me, as well. The first computer program that I remember shocking me with technology was a speaker program. I cannot remember the name of the program, but I remember getting it when I was about six years old. You would type on the program, like Word or PageMaker, but it had a function that would read the text out loud. At a Christmas party for the newspaper, my grandfather rolled his Mac into the doorway and typed up a generic greeting. When people arrived to the party, a sign told them to press enter, setting the computer on its way. “Welcome to the Breckenridge American office Christmas Party.” I sat by the computer for about an hour, listening in awe. The computer was so smart. I did not care that the computer sounded a little off when it read. Hit Return. “Welcome to the Breckenridge American office Christmas Party.” It sounded more like Wilkom too the Brickeenredge Aymiruhcain oh fice krist mass payrtee. The robotic droning of the computer would bumble and mispronounce the greeting, but that did not bother me. It was amazing. The computer was talking. Next it would take over the world.

Less than ten years later, I had become a PC man. I was a freshman in high school and had my own Packard Bell 486. My brother and my father each had a Mac. We would argue about which was better: PC or Mac; we still continue the battle today. My rural town is always behind the world when it comes to technology, so the Internet was already booming by the time I got online in 1996. I first signed up for a Hotmail account, back when it was still HoTMaiL; a play off of the HTML code that it used. My brother and I would spend hours at the computer looking up guitar tablature music. We would search for every ounce of Beatles information we could find. We played the game See Who can Search for Something and Get No Results. Neither of us ever won. My friends all came over to marvel at the technology taking over our society. They would search for random things and print things out. Everyone was like a dog that had just been let off of the leash. It was a newfound freedom that contained an entirely new world to explore. I became a member of dozens of chat rooms, and I played in some of the first online gaming sites. I used the Internet for research and fun and communication. I built my first homepage after about a month online. I remember that the address was something in the neighborhood of http://members.tripod.com/users/folders/user394k_39238eov/membersfolder/membername_vincemoore/index.html.

A couple of years passed and then came Napster. Music has always been extremely important to me. I have been listening and playing and writing music for many years, so the chance to get free songs whenever I wanted appealed to me greatly. My local ISP only offered 33.6 kbps, so downloading a single song could take well over a couple of hours; nevertheless, by the time I moved to Austin about six months later, I had accumulated about two hundred songs. When I moved into Jester Dormitory, my downloading patience was rewarded with T1 Ethernet lines. I downloaded roughly one thousand songs in the first two weeks of school. My frenzy increased with Morpheus. Now I could download more than songs?!? I downloaded episodes of Space Ghost and Saturday Night Live. I pirated movies and software left and right. By the end of my era of downloading frenzy, I had amassed nearly three thousand songs and five hundred videos. *

In my future, Information Technology will play a large role at the workplace. I plan on being a broadcast meteorologist after graduation from The University, a field that relies heavily on technology. Satellites are used to give us information about the atmosphere. Doppler radar sends us data as well, and every news station has a computer system dedicated to creating the weathercasts. This system usually contains two or more monitors, two CPUs, and a server. The server is the organization point that connects the graphics system to the incoming radar feed, the WeatherWire feed from the National Weather Service, the Internet computer, and the external data intake. The external data intake accepts temperature maps, constant height maps, and surface analyses. I will use information technology to gain all of the necessary data needed for an informed forecast, and I will use technology to create that weathercast. Weathercasts are created on a program that runs much like Flash. The program is made up of frames that use a predetermined template to make the weathercast uniform. The day’s weather data is then inputted onto the appropriate frame. The last touch of information technology comes when the meteorologist goes on air. The meteorologist stands in front of a chroma-key wall, or green screen, and computers overlay the weathercast images. The meteorologist looks at monitors to gain a bearing on where he is pointing on the images. The field I have chosen is full of specialized information technologies that I will get to use.

I live in a special time in our society. I was born when personal computers were first becoming available to many people; so I have seen the information technology come of age. As I have matured, so has the world of computing. I have seen where we have been; and I look forward to where we are going.

*One night I downloaded an unexpected friend: a .vbs virus that wiped out my entire collection. I am slowly regaining my library, but it will never be the same.