Teaching technology

My sister turned 70 last month. She has terminal cancer. She lost her husband two months ago. She is a strong woman and has a great attitude. Her husband refused to have cell phones, answering machines, PC's, or that technology 'stuff' in his house. He's gone now.

So, she turned 70, is staring death in the eye, doing chemo treatments five times a week and has never logged into Facebook, done a Google search, been Yahooed, seen Bing maps, purchased anything on eBay, never received or sent an email, and still thinks a mouse is something you trap, windows are to wash, and screens keep bugs out in the summer.

Three weeks ago, she asked me what she should get for a PC - that she wanted to get online. She knew she wanted a notebook or something like that, but had no idea about anything else. She is not stupid, but is not knowledgeable about how to use a PC, the Internet or any of that other 'stuff' that goes with being 'connected'. My task was to recommend a PC to her and teach her to use it.

What fun!

After hours of research, deep sole searching and fierce internal debates with myself, I recommended she get an iPad. Main reasons are the ease of use, Apple's history of developing fairly good stuff, and cost. Main concerns are that is it first generation and may not be easy enough to use. Biggest problem for me: I never owned a Mac and know way too much about this technology stuff o teach a novice.

What fun!

I got the iPad delivered to my home, got it synced to my PC and iTunes, and am learning about it so I can teach my sister. I find I have to put myself in a mindset of a novice and that is not easy for me or anybody who is 30 years or younger.

I'm having fun!

I remember times before the Internet, I remember Audicoder, COBOL, X.25, punch cards and programming mainframes computers that had 2000 bytes of memory. I helped develop ARPANET which was the first backbone for the Internet. I wrote data communications software that ran over phone lines at 1200 bits per second. I worked on spy satellites sending data back to a hunk of mainframes to detect missile launches. I worked on the battle planning for the first anti-missile project. I used the most powerful computers in the world to determine where satellites were orbiting. I worked on real time multi-processors machines that have more computing power in them than the whole world had running ten years earlier. I lived with Moor's law for 50 years seeing computers get 4 billion times more powerful than the first one I worked on. Four billion! If cars improved their gas mileage at that rate, my first car that got 5 miles per gallon would grow into one today that could drive around the earth 862,000 times on one gallon of gas!

And I have to forget all that and relate a person who has never owned a computer.

What a kick!

So, this is a great challenge for me and I'm going to enjoy it!

More later....