A Vietnam Vet's Trasition to the Digital Age

Josh Colby

DTC 375

Instructor Jason Farman

3.12.09

Word Count: 1,935

A Vietnam Vet’s Transition to the Digital Age

I interviewed my father, David Colby, who is a pretty simple and practical man whose wisdom I personally value. Through his life of 50 years so far he has seen a lot and has been through a lot and yet still has an optimistic zest to life and has used his experiences to teach me a lot. From his time in the Army during Vietnam to the beginning of his career as a meter relay technician all the way until present where he continues his successful career of 25 plus years at the Benton P.U.D. here in the Tri-Cities, he is truly one who has witnesses the exponential growth of technology in recent decades along with the advent of computer technologies. He was trained while in the service to type official documents on mechanical typewriters and was also the guy sorting through endless trays of punch card data wrought from an old IBM 360 which, by the way, could probably fill our downstairs living room. He also is an avid photographer by hobby who transitioned from old film cameras and developing techniques to enjoying the convenience of digital photography even though he has won local numerous photography contests with both methods.

After Dave’s service in Vietnam, he spent some time as an electrician at the Martin-Marietta aluminum plant in Goldendale before moving to the Tri-Cities to work for the P.U.D. In these professions, he has seen some great technological advances with some of the mechanisms that he has had to work with. The utility meter would be a great example of this where once it was completely motorized and would last for 30 years to now where everything is completely digital and interfaced through computers but nothing lasts as long but is at the same time cheaper. Even though Dave’s transition to technology was relatively simple, he made compelling points for and against digital age technologies giving good examples like this and saying multiple times how “there’s good and bad,” or “there’s advantages and disadvantages,” and this was the strongest theme of the interview.

He personally has enjoyed newer technologies in the home and on the job yet has seen many fruits of these technologies in younger generations that he finds distasteful. “Their penmanship stinks,” Dave said about younger generations today and jokingly added “it looks like they’re (referring to college grads) in the third grade as far as their penmanship because they don’t teach it anymore [like they used to].” Yet, when asked about what he doesn’t miss about the old way of doing things, he didn’t like how “they were slower,” and “you weren’t as productive.” Yet even though he had plenty to say about the old and new way of doing things, his transition seemed pretty seamless compared to some. “It wasn’t so much a transition at is simply was buying a computer” for him.

Josh - What method of writing did you use before computers to communicate?

Dave - We wrote long-hand; just writing on a piece of paper. Also, while in the army I learned how to type; not with an electric one but with a mechanical type writer. That is how you did official documents was with a mechanical typewriter. At a max I could get about thirty words per minute, but if you screwed up it was very tedious to fix it. A lot of the time you would have to throw it away and start all over again; there was no editing. You could white out a few letters but basically if you made a mistake you would have to start all over again. It was lousy (laughter)..

Josh - How long did it take to do that usually? Like, compared to now, how long did it take to write a document or a paper?

Dave - Well…the actual coming up with the document didn’t take much longer. A lot of the times I would write a lot of the thoughts down on paper, and then I would take and type it, compared to putting into a word processor now like Microsoft Office. But then, you would just basically get it the way you wanted on paper and then you’d put it – manually – type it. So, the editing and changing afterwards, like if you changed your mind, you’d basically just have to redo the whole stinkin’ paper. Now, you can move stuff around, change things, spell check…stuff like that. [Back then] you had to manually spell check with a dictionary. So the spell check, grammar, and things like that took a LOT longer cause you had to manually look it up in a book, and now you have a computer that does all the spell checking for you.

Josh - Name a task at your work and describe how it was done before and how it is done now with computers.

Dave - Word processing is probably the big thing that you do now that you couldn’t do before where everything was manual. Another one would be databases. I remember when I first was introduced to computers back in the 70’s, there was an IBM 360 which filled up this whole room and they were teaching me how to use this thing and all of the data was on punch cards. You had trays and trays of punch cards that they would sort. Now, you can do the same thing on Microsoft Excel where you can sort by the columns whereas with that you had to pick the cards all the way through and it might take hours to do. You just had to go through sort by another one and sort by another one with all these cards with little punches, little holes in the cards, and it would take hours. Now you can do the same thing in a matter of thirty seconds. It would take hours and hours to do before. That was with an IBM 360 back in the 70’s and that was the first computer that I ever saw.

Josh - Describe your own personal transition to computers, not only at work but in your personal life at home, with emphasis on difficulty.

Dave - It wasn’t so much a transition as it was simply buying a computer. I bought a 486 SX25 with 4 mg of RAM for $1400. It was $50 per one mg of RAM. It was MS-DOS, [as] there were a lot of DOS programs, and Microsoft Windows 3.1 was the operating system which was basically running on DOS. And so, there was a lot of command lines. If you wanted to do anything, you would have to drop down and do a lot of typing and memorize a lot of commands whereas a lot of stuff now is more automated. It was a lot more manual – getting a printer to work and dial-up modems versus Ethernet over the internet. You had to dial up and you had to configure the modems and sometimes that was a tedious thing trying to get them to work. It made the geeks worth more money cause it was harder to do stuff.

Josh - What do you think are the downfalls of computers compared to how it used to be?

Dave - One of the downfalls is with kids today. Their penmanship stinks. They don’t ever learn how to write [properly]. Most people that graduate now can hardly write legibly in long-hand whereas whenever I graduated from school penmanship was important and when you wrote you could read the writing, whereas now you can’t. Everything now is mostly computerized and text, so actual writing is not as stressed. So when some of the people do write, you look at the penmanship and its just awful. So when you try to read a letter today and you look at the penmanship, if its someone who is a college graduate, it [sometimes] looks like they’re in the third grade as far as their penmanship because they don’t teach it anymore [like they used to]. I noticed that big-time. Also, people might not learn how to spell as much because they rely on things like spell check instead of learning the actual spelling, and if spell check doesn’t catch it a word might get by and the people without the knowledge will read it and since the spell check missed it they won’t know better. It might be spelled correctly but it might be wrong for the context. That’s a trap for those people.

Josh - What were some of the downfalls to the old way of doing things before computers?

Dave - They were slower. You weren’t as productive.

Josh - Which technology do you prefer now?

Dave - As far as computers? …

Josh - More specifically do you prefer computers over the old way of doing things or not?

Dave - There’s good and bad. Most of the stuff that I work with, like for instance what used to be an electromechanical meter which was a revenue meter that would run for 30 years on a motor, now is digitized and you interface with it with computers. Well, they’re more susceptible to glitches, they don’t last as long because their electronic components degrade quicker over time than some electromechanical device. So, they do a lot more and they’re more accurate, but they’re possibility for more error. Usually the electrical stuff doesn’t last as long as the old stuff which has longer life, but one of the things about [computers] is they’re a lot cheaper so you can afford to replace them every three to five years. Some of the electronic meters that twenty years ago cost $50 twenty years later cost $25 so when they used to spend a lot of money on the old meters fixing them, now they just put a new one in. So there’s good and bad. They don’t last as long but they’re cheaper and more accurate. This is more an electrical utility meter.

Josh - What about more like in your home life/personal life though? Do you like having computers?

Dave - Oh yeah. Well you can do so much more with computers like in the media. Take digital media for instance. Like with pictures, you would have to take 35mm film and then send the whole roll in to get it printed and you would have to pay for every picture (even the lousy pictures). So, you’d have a bunch of pictures and let’s say you’d have twenty pictures in a row and maybe five pictures that were really good. With digital you can just delete the bad ones and save the good ones. You’d have to remember to print [the pictures] or you can’t really do anything and you can’t even look at them. The disadvantage of not having them on film is that if you lose your hard drive then you lose all of your digital files. So, there are advantages and disadvantages. With the old way with film they would last longer than a digital file. Sometimes you can have a lot of work and have it gone by accidentally deleting a file or getting a virus the will wreck your computer. A lot of your work could be gone, whereas something that is a hard copy paper type thing you might not lose it as easily as something like a file where you can lose it or have a virus crash your computer and you lose all your work if you don’t back it up or do proper maintenance of your stuff.