Computers The Internet and Information Technology

(last updated 20/09/05)
Like most with any sort of an eye to the future, the interest in Computers was developing by the late 1980's and from my own point of view this was especially the case in that my life had become an almost entirely unmitigated horror story. After having been introduced to the World and an apparently ordinary English middle class family in the mid sixties, my life had become by the mid seventies a ghastly pauperising rigmarole of dealing with various unpleasant situations which stemmed from my having been given over into the custody of my Father and of him having lost his career and become a peevish drunk and malcontent who tried to use me to sell under age sex to the daughter of a local Magistrate. By the mid eighties I had decided that I would never be working happily for the nation in which I had been born and was seeking to publicise the fact that I was being routinely treated with less respect by the local authorities than terrorists, and child molesters. If I didn't in many respects have the broad aim in mind then of emigrating instead of enduring the harsh existence of a miscreant serf I certainly have it now.

In 1994-5 I acquired a Tiny 486sx with a star dot matrix printer (now long deceased and as yet not replaced) via my Mother & a half brother who was taking a degree in computer science. All the obvious spiralling technical requirements for indulgence in more than word processing, data entry and comparatively low spec games only fuelled the obvious interest in claims that were being made concerning the capacity of the modern PC, which in turn drove me if not to ignore the short term question of little and irregular income, bill arrears and petty debts to increase it's general ability then to endure many comparatively immense hardships in pursuance of the goal of getting on more even terms with the bureaucrats hypocrites and morally bankrupt characters who run the Windsorian UK.

The main point I have to make for anyone contemplating a similar course of action I suppose, is that the Industry makes many startling claims which ought to have really been regarded as false in terms of simple English, the term 'user friendly' springs to mind and I really feel that where Computers are concerned nothing is user friendly and that if you ate not computer literate then you are simply at the mercy of those who are. When I had an upgrade done to my first workstation by an establishment on Norwich Road called Tempted which was principally run by a bloke called Phil, I was lied to and robbed of about £100 worth of odds and ends and since gathered that Phil, had a liking for computer chips belonging to his Employers prior to the debilitating experience of meeting him and his thieving friends. Information as to the whereabouts of anyone involved with the company would be appreciated and it hardly needs saying that I don't advise anyone to purchase anything from these characters.

Amongst other things they gave me a useless piece of miscellaneous hardware claiming it was the soundblaster clone I should have had returned. They also sold me an upgrade costing approaching £500 on the basis that they would ensure not only that I would have no problems with the hardware but that they would provide me with sufficient basic instruction as to be able to use e-mail, fax and a browser only to subsequently provide me with a little booklet detailing extrra charges.

When the base unit was assembled Nothing worked and I was told I would need a new operating system which I then half paid for but didn't get the disc or even a proper installation. I had to make upwards of a half dozen visits before the thing would even begin to do what it should. Make no mistake, meeting these people was a nasty kick in the teeth as this was the most money I had ever invested in anything at any one time. I was trying to look after my aged and sick Father as well as cope with his other delinquent son and had been told to expect that this would end my problems with the Computer. The damage these people did to my affairs would be more properly measured in tens of thousands of pounds rather than in mere thousands. At the time I could arguably be said led a fairly busy life involved in voluntary work, amateur sports and possibly music. It is a literal fact that having to spend months learning to use win95 without a manual and failing to use an ATI graphics card completely destroyed every single aspect of such a modest social and business existence as I enjoyed at the time. I was completely at the mercy of anyone who walked through the door who had a disc or an idea as to how to make the thing function.

Oh dear Life is a real trial at times isn't it.

The problem I think with international copyright issues is not only that Goverments have a tendency to tolerate whatever so called public opinion finds acceptable, as in the case of it being impracticable to evict settlers from the Black Hills in the 1860's so many copyright rules have been fairly widely ignored for the convenience of both governments and individuals. Since one or two of the people I knew when I first sought to acquire Computer hardware were quite well in with certain aspects of the Education department I managed to get a few better insights than the average user before downloading became a widely debated issue relevant to the mass market in the UK and I gather that overall the cd industry has as yet to lose 10 % of it's sales despite anxiety that sales would collapse. I think that hunting down clips and sampling different music is one of the great things about the convenience of Computer use in that I could never for example think of buying certain kinds of music until I had listened to it and I'd never be able to listen to a fraction of what I can now if I had to trawl around loads of specialist shops so it is a fairly good point that file sharing is likely to stimulate general long term demand for Music cd's as well as occasioning some decline in short term sales and in addition to that it is also a fairly ludicrous prospect to suggest that people who surf through chat channels aren't going to download samples of copyrighted material whilst it is openly being advertised for download. Using IRC was one of the first programmes I managed to use regularly with any success once I had acquired good enough computer hardware and I suppose the immediate novelty or attraction of the thing was that it did actually do some of what the Industry was saying about the capacities of the modern PC in the mid to late nineties and proferred a taste of the sort of performance that manufacturers were claiming for their products.

I suppose there must be many like myself who have bought computer hardware on the promptings of hearsay and advertising only to find that maybe the hardware is up to glibly made performance claims but only under ideal optimum conditions which never occur in practice. Either that or they are going to have to pay a specialist a fortune to demonstrate how it actually works, or discover that one requires numerous additional components or enhancements or software upgrades. For myself on a limited budget learning the difference between extravagent claims about what can be done and what is possible for oneself was a lengthy bitter process during the course of which hardware was out of date before the payments had been made on it and One had not found it possible to do any of the things for which one purchased the thing without a great deal of additional research and hassle of various sorts.

Having grown up in the 70's without money and having childhood memories of fighting over cheap Japanese transistor radios, the promise of a desktop machine that could handle multimedia and various telecommunicative functions seemed to offer the small man with ambitions and the willingness to work hard some hope of success in a bureaucratised world full of Insurance Companies, malicious Solicitors, deceitful Politicians, shiftless Cops and heartless Multinational Corporations. Finding that one could actually exchange text messages and much more with any other Computer hooked up to the Web simply and conveniently was in itself a pleasant change from error messages, disconnections, demands for more modern components, large telephone bills and misleading assistance.

Many have essayed elucidation of the impact of the new communications capabilities of our modern computer chips and in many ways it is impossible to understate this. The consistent ability of the PC to make a laughing stock out of every other piece of home technology is literally astounding and owing to the nature of the ongoing process, quite incalculable. It might be something of a misappraisal of the role and function of these machines to say that many aspects of our lives have been and are going to be utterly revolutionised by them as the increasing impact of their usage will be to my mind at least one of degree rather than one of kind, which is to say more simply that they won't really be changing the nature of what we do so much as multiplying the rate of efficiency with which we do it.

In seeking not get carried away with our enthusiasm for the new media it ought to be pointed out there are many factors which limit the improvement on general quality of life that the PC can theoretically provide, that human ability is one of them and that One can only in many respects get out of something what One puts in. I have been astonished to see how much time people are willing to spend exchanging inane rubbish, jingoistic claptrap and downright insults as conversation and find it especially foolish when it is authored by the anonymous in that I really think if there is any point at all in saying something that it has to be said by someone.

It is some testament to the ephemerality of the human situation that the Americans who many in the UK and on the Continent still like to think of as country bumpkins or ignorant backwoodsman have managed to make themselves world leaders in the field of computer-technology. Perhaps it was the strategic requirements of the massive US military-industrial complex which kick started the thing into life but there's no excuse for people lagging behind and being proud of their ignorance: One does not require the superior material resources of the US to produce hundreds of thousands of desktop PC's which are small and convenient and can make many a prison cell apartment in a public housing project a more palatable proposition if one can can get round the antisocial symptoms of the crime problem by one means or another.

The extent to which there seems to be no sense of what can be achieved is to my mind all too well illustrated by some of the mindless conversation that I have found on the Channel England, in IRC undernet where the desperately ignorant image of the average Briton as promulgated by the advertising Industry as a man with an open necked shirt, a close cropped haircut, a Londonish accent and a rarely overworked vocabulary of about thirty words has become a nightmarish reality. It is however probably a more generally disturbing prospect that every significant political debating forum I have found has been taken over by voices that seem to belong to rightist American demagogues most of whom seem to be feigning psychopathic character traits.