In the beginning, IBM created the XT: 512K RAM, 10 MB hard drive, and a floppy drive that ran disks that held a whopping 640K of data.
I lie. Of course, there were earlier personal computers. In the early '80's, I got into my first chat room trouble with a little Commodore Vic-20 (20K RAM, hooked to your TV monitor and connected to an online service at 300 baud). Even earlier than that, I had a Computer Science teacher (this was during the Dark Ages of the late 1970's), who boasted that he'd just bought an Apple. That would be an Apple ONE, folks. I remember, because it was the first time I'd ever heard of Apple, or any kind of personal computer.
Back then, computers were huge, and I don't mean in terms of popularity. They filled entire rooms, which had to be kept refrigerator cold, lest the machinery overheat. The idea of owning one of your own -- and keeping it on a desktop -- was the stuff of science fiction.
I was a Radio-Television-Film major and had never before had any interest in computers until a prescient professor in my Media Management class opined that those of us who wanted to be employed had better learn a thing or two about them, because they were the future. So there I was, in Computer Science 100, like a deer caught in the headlights...
...because that class seemed designed to weed out all the Liberal Arts dillettantes who might have any crazy ideas of learning something useful. We spent the entire semester learning to write a program in Assembly Language. I'm not talking about BASIC or COBOL or FORTRAN or any of the other computer languages that were common at the time. Assembly Language is computing's lowest common denominator: just a tiny step above bits. 0's and 1's.
On top of that, the programs we wrote had to be input using punch cards. One card for each command. My final for the course was to bring my program -- which amounted to a 2-inch stack of cards -- to an office where someone would input it into a compiler and see if the thing worked.
I finished it on the very day it was due and rushed as fast as I could to the Computer Science lab... only to drop the stack on the way. The cards scattered in the wind; I picked them up and tried to put them back in order the best I could.
I flunked Computer Science. It was my first and only F.
But ten years later, I acquired that beautiful IBM XT, and it literally changed my life. I no longer had to worry about writing my own programs. My XT came equipped with DOS and WordPerfect, utilities like Norton and Fastback, and a modem that allowed me to get in new chat room trouble.
I loved that machine. The humiliating memory of that Computer Science class faded. I liked the DOS environment. I could make WordPerfect do magic. Before long, I was writing complicated macros with popup menus; stuff that impressed the hell out of my bosses, and my co-workers, who considered me the "Go To Gal" for all things computer-related.
I was fearless. I knew that no matter how I might screw something up, I could put it back together again, and usually made it better than it was to begin with.
But time marches on. The XT was replaced by the AT, and then came the 386 and the 486, and the Pentium. And each upgraded processor seemed to be accompanied by a more complicated operating system.
The Windows environment frustrates me to pieces. The graphical user interface (anyone else out there remember GUI? Or WYSIWYG?) makes it seem easier to operate, but the truth is, nothing in Windows is easy ("Get a Mac," I can hear my sister snickering to me right now). Things that could be accomplished in an instant in DOS can take ten times as long in Windows. And where I used to be in control of every application I added to my machine, now I have to leave it up to Windows and Windows buries those files in subdirectories of subdirectories of subdirectories so that I no longer even know what's running in memory or what it does.
I'm back to where I was when I was writing that program on punch cards: Clueless. And not in control.
I've undergone a similar curve on the Internet. Six months after becoming a full-time stay-at-home mom (in 1999 -- when my daughter was 3), I realized I needed to bring in some part-time income. My father, who had become something of an Internet entrepreneur in his retirement, recruited me to run a work-at-home website targeted to parents. I taught myself enough HTML to slap together a few pages, which we christened The ParentPreneur Club, which was launched in early 2000.
I did all the webmastering myself. I learned to install simple CGI programs. I discovered cool javascript snippets that generous programmers made available to the public in exchange for a link. I even spun off a Family-Content site and became a syndicator of material for other mom-and-pop entrepreneurs to use for their own businesses. And when Megan started kindergarten in 2001, I volunteered to create a website for her school's PTA.
And as the years went by, I discovered that while I enjoyed the creative process of building a website, I truly hated the work involved in keeping one up-to-date. And as website design became more sophisticated, I realized that I'd reached the limits of what I could do as a self-taught webmaster. I am only capable of creating the simplest graphics, I am unable to write scripts on my own, and Flash is a mystery to me.
The environment also got more complicated, as advertising revenue became more traffic-oriented and search engine optimization became a graduate-level field of its own. It was harder to trust people you met on the Internet. It became de rigeur to include privacy policies with all kinds of legal boilerplate on your site. Spammers and hackers and phishers made it necessary to implement all kinds of security measures.
It had stopped being fun. It had also stopped being profitable. I got to the point where the only part of webmastering I enjoyed was writing the content. I started this blog (on Typepad, because I couldn't bear the thought of trying to design another crappy looking website) in 2003. By 2005, I'd abandoned any pretense of trying to make money off the Internet. I sold my business sites and focused on doing what I loved -- writing. (Ironically, this blog has led to revenue-generating work, thanks largely to the amazing contacts I made when I became a member of BlogHer, but that's another story I'll tell later.)
But I still had a website that needed to be maintained. After about two years of running the PTA website, I was ready to do something else. Correction: I had been recruited into wearing several other hats. I desperately wanted to offload the website to someone else.
The problem was, there was no one available to take it. Because as much as I knew how inadequate my webmastering abilities are, I was still light years ahead of all the other stay at home moms active in the PTA (or at least, the ones I knew. I am certain that there are IT professional parents at that school who could handle the site with ease -- they just never made themselves known).
I had become a huge bottleneck in keeping the site up to date. Other PTA Board members would email me with material they wanted there, and I would have to cut and paste it onto pages, create links, and upload the new pages to the site. I came to the conclusion that we needed some kind of interactive content management system that would allow the other members to put their material up themselves.
But these kind of scripts -- which all require the use of mySQL databases -- are really complicated! And as time marches on, and they become more sophisticated, I am discovering that my computing abilities are less and less up to par. In fact, I am starting to think of myself as less of a computer maven and more of what my friend Faith calls a "TechTard."
After a lot of trial and error, I had the bright idea of running the site on a blogging platform. As I was already familiar with Typepad, I ended up buying a nonprofit license for Movable Type, which I installed and configured for the site. And as keeping up with the school calendar was one of the most confusing and time consuming of all my tasks, I searched and found a terrific little PHP program that would make that task easy. It took me some time to figure out how to embed it into my MT templates, but I managed that, too. And all was good.
The site now pretty much ran on its own. As Megan culminated from the school last year and there was now no choice, I found someone to take over for me as website administrator, and all was well...
...until December, when my friend Tammy -- who I've known online since I launched my first website and owns the company that hosts the PTA site -- informed me that there was a problem. She was in the process of upgrading her servers, and discovered that phishers had taken advantage of a security breach in my MT install and were using our sweet little PTA site to spam people and con them. As no one in the PTA had the knowledge to fix the problem (which I felt I had exposed them to), I got sucked back in. (Not meaning to denigrate my friends who are still on the PTA there -- I'd just hoped to be done with it!)
I spent about a week before Christmas disabling all the scripts that were running and hunting for the phishers, who had created a subdirectory within another little-used subdirectory. That done and with the holidays coming, I waited for Tammy to complete her server update and give me the word that I could put everything back up.
That word came last week. And, as I've learned with everything tech over the last several years, putting the pieces back together is easier said than done. For one thing, something related to the server upgrade is not allowing my old scripts to run properly. So I tried switching from Movable Type to WordPress (which is something many of my more knowledgeable techie friends have urged me to do in the past). WP is definitely easier to install than MT, but I discovered that in order to import the existing posts into the new blog, I needed to reinstall MT anyway. That took me about eight hours to do.
And I'm still not done. I was only able to import about two months' worth of old posts (why? I don't know). I still have MT running on the site concurrently with WP. And I placed the WP install in the root directory, thinking that's where I wanted the landing page to be. However, index.html gives me a huge error message, so I need to create a static index page with a redirect to index.xml. As long as I need to do that, I should probably put WP in its own subdirectory (which is what the program wants to default to, anyway).
I need to uninstall the old MT program, reinstall the new WP program, then add the PTA logo and other items to make it pretty. I also need to do the same with a static splash page that will serve as a gateway to the part of the site that works. The Calendar program still doesn't work, so I may have to find another solution.
The bottom line is that I gave myself a week to fix the PTA site, during which I didn't write anything for this blog and neglected the one that is currently paying me to write. AND I'M NOT DONE. I figure I have at least another week's worth of work on it.
And then, I am going to be called to work on Faith's women's wear site, which I put together for her (badly). The good news is that she and her partner have grown their business so much that they have moved out of her garage and into a proper warehouse, and are now ready to hire a professional to do a redesign (something I have advised them to do from the beginning).
The bad news is that they still want me to do the site maintenance for them -- and I need the money (although after losing 49 pounds, I may take the payment in clothing, because that's one of the reasons I need money!)
These days, I feel a lot like I did when I was stymied in Computer Science. But as techtarded as I am, I can still go boldly where I shouldn't and make a big mess. Hopefully, I can figure out how to fix them.
We had another meeting of the Moms Movie Club on Friday -- See what we thought of 27 Dresses on my review blog.
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