Last Century

 A very long time ago, in the late 1900s, I took over the computer lab at Horace Mann Elementary. It was a room full of Mac LCIIs connected by a series of spaghetti connections called Apple Talk. Printing was done on tractor feed machines that sounded like small arms fire when they got going. The software was a fistful of three inch floppy disks that had to be inserted in each machine to get them up and running. And the most intriguing prospect was that I inherited all of this with the large and overly complex lack of a password to unlock all of the various functions for all this Steve Jobs joy. 

The happy news came on two fronts: I learned that, as prep teacher, I was not required to have my program up and running for the first two weeks of school while we got the kiddos settled into their homeroom ruts. Additionally, I was asked to shepherd a half dozen third graders who were part of an enrollment overflow. These were my very first students, and they were kept busy with all manner of worksheets and promises of joining their own real class just as soon as one could be found or created for them. 

Eventually, I was able to create a room full of working machines: A Computer Lab. I created a mascot, Click The Mouse, to entertain the children while I scrambled about loading KidPix and Oregon Trail on the taxed memory of the barely there computers. And I thought about all this when I showed up this past Monday morning to find that all the fancy refurbished PCs had all been remotely reconfigured so my morning was full of logging in and checking two dozen plus settings for Windows and making sure they would all fire up when kids appeared shortly thereafter to begin their day in Horace Mann's Computer Lab. 

No more floppy discs. No more CD-ROMs. It's all done by network. If I had a mind to, I could sit at my desk and monitor the progress of all my little users from an app on my screen designed to keep them on the educational path and out of the ditches that Al Gore's Internet so playfully provides. No more Oregon Trail. No more KidPix. I don't have any printers left in my room. We don't print very much anymore. We send things to the cloud. Way back in the 1900s, if a kid left my room without a colorful dot matrix print of whatever their fertile imaginations could generate in sixteen bits, there were tears. 

Now the tears are mine. Longing for those days when I could simply find the right plug or blow the dust out of a disc drive to get things back in order. The good old 1900s.