MODULE 8
(Computers and Education)
I think I have been very
lucky to grow up before computers, and watching them take over the world.
I owned a Texas Instruments TI-99 in 1982, and began learning to program my own
graphics and create cheesy animations at 12 years old. I graduated high
school in 1988, and computers were not that big yet. We had a Lotus 123
class in highschool, and that was about it. Lotus was a database
management software, and was used for businesses for things like inventory, and
customer management. I really did not use computers very much, till I
started working for a digital sound library company in Santa Cruz California in
1994. I have always worked with music, or around music, and my first
computer was a Macintosh LC with 2 megabytes of ram. I remember how
excited everyone in the office was when we upgraded to a whopping 4 megabytes!
It is amazing how I could create music with such a slow computer that
had little hard drive space, or memory. The data back then was not as
big, and 16 bit 44.1 khz was what we recorded at because of drive space.
We used to back everything up to Iomega Zip drives, Jazz drives, and Ditto
drives. Iomega drives were SCSI and the throughput was very fast, and you
backed everything up to tape. When external drives started to surface,
you could utilize 10,000 rpm SCSI drives, and they were very fast. They
were comparable in speed to the "Raptor" drives of today from Western
Digital, but they were less then 500 Megabytes, so they could not hold alot of
data. Needless to say we thought we were in heaven with our lightning
fast machines, and huge hard drives. I remember once at a music
conference called the NAMM show, a panel from apple discussed the terrabyte,
and exobyte drives that were on there way, we all just kind of laughed.
When I first started college
in 1996, Netscape was our browser at WSU, and Altavista was our search engine.
The internet was very slow, and it was very buggy, and things always
crashed. I do believe that the Technical Sales department at WSU was one
of the first in the country to offer online classes. I took some of them,
and they were very slow, but efficient. After I left college, I
embarked on my career in music, and after 20 years am still in the business.
My early adulthood found me building Digital Audio Workstations or "DAWS,
"and configuring them for music recording all across the country.
The music world changed with the advent of Windows 98 and even more with
Windows XP. The computer components were faster, bigger, and able to
handle great amounts of stress from processor intensive tasks. The
Pentium 3 processor was probably one of the greatest computer inventions I can
remember, as it enabled me to record more tracks in a session than ever
before. Also, the ability to have gigabytes of ram played a very
important role in my work. I have worked for several audio software
manufacturers, and have seen the technology grow from nothing. I still
own a recording studio powered by a 12 core Mac with 32 gigs of ram, and SSD
drives that are extremely fast. There is no audio or video task that I
cannot perform on that computer. I have seen computer technology go
through every phase of it's evolution, and have actively participated in it;s
growth. I eagerly anticipate new technology, as it has shaped who I am,
and influenced my education in ways that I never thought possible. I envy
the children of today, being born into the speed and power of today's
computers, it can be a blessing for them, but I also feel that technology is a
curse. Children today are growing up a little bit lazy, and Googling
everything is a lazy approach to research, and life. God Speed!
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