Super Shareware Collection/Super Shareware Collection.iso/info/kgl_9401.zip/QUIETDAY.ART

Text File | 1994-02-03 | 6KB | 144 lines

"A Quiet Day at the Computer"
(A Tale of Unmitigated Woe)
by Harold S. Goldberg


   I had to be an inadequate grandfather.  How else could you explain
my not having a single one of those enormous children's games in my
computer.  For shame!

   My son-in-law, sensing that he might be depriving his children every
time they visited, bought four of these games for me and even offered to
install them.  But what is there to installing a new program?  Nothing,
right?  So I installed them.

   Two games worked.  Two didn't.  The screen said the computer didn't
have enough RAM memory.  Dumb computer.  I should know that it contained
four megabytes of RAM.  That ought to be enough.


Off To The Guru

   Off I went to a local guru.  "Yeah," he said, "those computers do
that.  They give you memory but they don't let you use it.  Here," he
offered, "try this."  With that he handed me a program.  "This should
solve your problems."

   Now I felt pretty good.  I figured that I don't have to be a
computer master to handle these home computers.  All I need are
friends.

   I ran home, pushed in the disks and followed instructions.
Installed.  Shut down.  Boot up.  Got startup.  Go to games.  Operate
games.  They worked.  Bring on the grandchildren!

   I tried my word processor.  It worked.  I switched to Windows.
Nothing!  Windows wouldn't work.

   Well, it almost worked.  The picture would come up and then it
would go back to the directory.  Certainly, no Windows.  Oh well,
back to my friendly guru.


To The Guru Again

   "Fixes the games," I explained, "but no Windows."

   "Yeah, I was afraid of that," he answered.  "Forget that one.
Here, take out that program and put in this one."  He handed me a DOS
6 upgrade for my DOS 4.

   I wasn't concerned about upgrading my DOS.  After all, the
computers treat you like an idiot on these upgrades, telling you
exactly what to do, which I needed.  It was the other program he had
given me that bothered me.  It was all over my computer.  It was in
my startup, in my config, in everything.  How do you take it out?  My
guru only looked at me contemptuously.  "Follow instructions."  Am I
unique in being intimidated by my computer?

   I dutifully installed DOS 6, which, I must admit, is easy to do.
There were no instructions for ridding my system of old programs.  I
decided to be daring.  I changed to the old startup codes,
AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS.  (I read about that stuff, once.)

   I moved to various programs.  Lo and behold, Windows worked.  The
games worked.  How proud can a guy get.  I turned off the computer.
I turned it back on.

   "Disk failure!"

   That's all.  The screen had "Disk failure" printed on it.  No
startup, no picture, just "disk failure".  I couldn't move the keys.
Like a car with no battery, no startup, no nothing.

   Some say it is impossible to become violently ill instantaneously.
They are mistaken.  However, after a little while the stomach
troubles subsided and I managed to find some old startup disks and
get the computer to function a little.  There was no trouble finding
disks.  By this time, the floor was full of them.


CPR

   Then I used my recovery system to return to square one.  I
reinstalled everything including "that" program.  I started to check
everything.  The games worked.  Windows worked.  Hooray!  I was a
success!  Review the spreadsheets.  No spreadsheet!  My spreadsheet
was gone.  The computer kept returning me to the prompt line.

   Now my computer was beginning to achieve live status.  I talked
words to it.  I was amazed at my vocabulary.  I then said nice things
to it. I can now report that stroking a computer does no more for it
than deriding it and the latter is more satisfying.

   I found my old spreadsheet disks.  I reinstalled.  It worked.  I
checked my data files.  They were blank.  The files came up but the data
had fled.  Gone, wiped out!  I used my recovery system to get them back.
No good.  Still no data.  How on earth can a computer figure out how to
return a whole spreadsheet and leave out the data?

   I went to my word processor.  All my files were there.  There were
words in the files.  Except, most of my reports got shortened.  The
computer must have decided that I write too much and stopped my data in
midstream.  Why didn't it tell me before I wrote them that they were too
long?

   Then I found the lost messages.  They were sitting somewhere else in
the computer with another program name on them.  No, I hadn't put them
there.  The computer did.  (Oh, I'm sick.)


All's Well That Ends, Period

   I am now in the middle of a search and destroy mission of maverick
pieces of data.  I am also in the process of redoing half my
spreadsheets.

   I also have a few other problems.  My 80 megabyte hard disk, which
started this episode about half full, now has 2 megabytes left.  I think
I put in 20 megabytes with the four games.  I have a half dozen or so
directories suffixed "old" or "Hal" or some other thing, which I don't
think are doing much in the machine.  I also have dozens of programs
dotted throughout the machine which my computer has written to itself,
and perhaps to others of its cult.

   But the games work.  Unfortunately, the grandchildren don't want to
use them since it seems my computer doesn't come with a voice expander,
so the voices in the games come out garbled.  No grandchild, I'm told,
wants to play on a computer that can't talk.  My son-in-law is offering
to buy a voice expander to solve the problem.  I may have other plans
for my son-in-law.

   In the meantime, I'm learning all about how these computers work.
No, I'm not.  I'm learning how they fail.  I'm also beginning to believe
the earth has been invaded by creatures from outer space.  They come
with keyboards, displays, and ...

   This is our future?

-------------------------------------------------------
[reprinted with permission from The Reflector, published by the IEEE
Boston Section]


                   -thirty-