“Technologically Challenged - Me ??”

July 8, 2007 by Jim Wilks.

I can well relate to Jerry’s comments about being “Technologically Challenged”. I never thought I was untill the day came when I knew I was! Working for the Union Pacific Railroad back in the “80’s, we (the UPRR) had the latest and greatest in computer techology. Always keeping pace with the business world, the mighty UPRR was constantly upgrading their computer systems. It was really nice as all the programming was already setup for you. If you wanted to write a letter, you simply accessed the “letter symbol” on your screen (much later I learned it was called an “icon”). If you wanted to save all your work for later use you just pushed the save button and the computer saved it to your screen. (boy we’re talking old stuff now, green screen and all)

After a few years of this type of computer use, I figured I could use a computer at home. My lovely, precious wife went to Radio Shack and bought us a TRS80 II Color Computer with 64k Ram. Yep, that’s right, it was a COCO 2. As I recall, it used cartridges and didn’t even have a floppy drive. Well, needless to say, I wasn’t the computer guy I thought I was & through complete frustration, the COCO 2 lasted only a short time.


A little later, in 1987, we bought a Hewlett Packard 8086 with 640k of Ram (we’re blazing now) and a 20 mb hard drive with a printer for the amazing price of $2000.00. The guy at the store said, and I quote “You’ll never fill up this hard drive”. Even today, I laugh everytime I think about what he said.


Well, being an avid UPRR computer user and thinking I knew all about computers, I quickly found out just how ignorant I really was, and “technologically challenged”, yea, I was. You see, the UPRR computers were on a mainframe with everything already setup on them so anyone could come in and write a letter or a file of some sort. I was using just one of their many “dumb terminals” (all tied to the main frame) If you could figure out how to type, you could use their computers, it was that simple. (remember, this was all before windows was introduced). When I tried to use my new “top of the line” Home PC, was I in for an awakening. I knew how to start the thing (push, where it said power) and that was the extent of my home computer knowledge. (we’re talking early windows V3.1)where there were no icons, you started programs by going to the c:/ prompt and typing a name for the program. Yes, I tried reading the book, boooorrring, and confusing, to say the least. I had a “friend” at work that was truly a “computer guru”, and I would ask him every day how to do different things on my computer and all he would say was “Read the book”. After several times of hearing the same thing from him, I quickly learned to stop asking him. My wife happened to work for Farm Credit in Wichita and they had just switched to the windows based computers. So when she learned at work, she came home and showed me. From there it was all uphill, trial and error, lots of miscalculations, unintended deletions and more computer crashes than I care to remember. I remember saying to my wife one night, after a particularly trying evening of trying to do what we thought we wanted to do on the computer and then learning that I had just deleted an entire days work, “why are we punishing ourselves, we bought this @$#%$@^$ thing to help us and it’s only making me mad”.

After much trial and error, in 1995, my wife and I started a home based business, www.SBRco.com , that relies heavily on the computer. We do things now that 15 years ago we didn’t even know existed. Graphic design, photo restoration, desktop publishing, E-business, website design and publishing, “blogs” and the list goes on & on & on.

“Technologically Challenged - Me ??”, sometimes, I still feel as if I am, like when I started this “Blog site”. But I got over it!!! Just like Jerry said in his post, I’m still a long long way from being called a computer guru, but I’m working on it.

Jerry is absolutely right. Anyone can learn to use the computer. And in a relatively short time. So if you know of someone who has ”thought about it” but never tried it, have them “think about it again” and this time take that first step. It’ll open up a whole “ ’nother world”.

Over the years, if there is only one thing I have learned, it’s that the computer is only as smart as the person hitting the keys. Need help ??? There’s no such thing as a dumb question. The only “dumb” thing would be not to ask that question in the first place.


Happy Computin’ and Keep on Blogging!

Jim Wilks - Class of 1962