In a small cabin overlooking the sun setting on Lake Champlain this past Saturday, my family discussed the beginnings of computers and the internet. I casually asked my parents, “What was it like when computers and the internet were first starting?” They both rolled their eyes and were brought back to another world in which computers took up entire rooms. The first programming classes consisted of typing keys into a machine that would create stacks of cards with holes in them. My dad would bring stacks of cards in to the computer to be run, and the next day he would get a “print out” in his mailbox of what the program did. He would either get some sort of language that indicated the program didn’t work, or he got multiple pages of what the program accomplished overnight. The idea was that the holes in these cards allowed wires to make contact with the metal below the cards, which signaled zeros and ones. If you got your cards out of order? Man, you’re screwed.

“Back in the day…” my dad was working with bits. Eight bits to a byte, 1024 bytes to a megabyte, etc. Nowadays, a single photo is multiple megabytes. My iPod holds thirty gigabytes – that’s 257698037760 bits of information.

My dad reminisced about the day that Windows came out with their first software. His eyes got big and he shook his head caught up in the memory, “That was huge.”

I have no real point in this blog post other than HOLY COW! I can’t even begin to understand how small computer memory started out, let alone what it was like to see that happen. When my dad got out of grad school and started working, he was the first person in his office to have a computer. Company tours included going to see the “Harvard Grad With A Computer.” How incredible is that? He has seen computers develop from the beginning up to today, when he manages huge files on his touchscreen iPad using complex programs without even touching the zeros and ones.

Looking forward to the break. I have worked hard and I deserve it! Going to see my brother and my New York friends soon which I am looking forward to. Even though I do love Middlebury and the people around me, I was born and raised in a city environment and literally can’t wait for the pollution and noise again.

No real reason to blog. It’s been a long day for me; I invested around 6 hours in the library. Don’t really know what to write about.

I went for the “American” look today. I wore a white shirt, blue jeans, a red vest and an US Open cap, demonstrating my eagerness to learn about American culture. Haha, lol? Do you guys use lol in blogging occasions? I think it is pretty suitable to be honest because blogging is more informal.

Before reading this entry, it is important to note that I don’t really know what college was like prior to the internet, but I am merely making assumptions based off of what my parents and other older relatives have described to me about what their college experiences were like.

There is a ridiculous amount of books in the library. I haven’t even checked out what the stacks on the first floor are like and I still cannot believe how there can be so many books. What percentage of them do you think have actually been read? So far, I have not had to check out a book from the library. I’m sure I will at some point this year, but the thought of it terrifies me. Is this seriously what my parents did in order to find information on a subject while they were in college? Every time they needed a bit of information, they would have to check out a book at the library?

I don’t think this was the case. I can’t know for certain, but I feel like the internet and the digital age have allowed universities to create a much more intensive program. They didn’t have electronic reserves twenty years ago. They didn’t have search engines and scholarly article databases. Their access to information was very limited. We now have access to so many platforms for research that it has exponentially diversified the knowledge resources we have access to. For example, my International Politics class requires approximately 100-150 pages of reading for every class. The sources for these readings are extremely varied. On any given night, I may read a twenty page passage from three different books via electronic reserves, one scholarly article via JStor, and a few chapters from a physical book that I purchased for the class. My parents didn’t have this option. In fact, when I try to explain it to them, they are completely dumbfounded by the notion. My dad told me that the majority of his readings were done through one to three books for a given course. Whereas I have read portions of well over thirty books already. The rise of the internet has absolutely made information easier to acquire. Yet, this has lead to the curriculum of classes to be much harder.

Their is a wonderful side-effect to this. It is preparing students for a much more diversified world. Students in the 80′s would never have to worry about maintaining a blog, twitter account, and wiki page for a single class. We do. Contemporary college students have been compelled by technology to learn more from more sources and garner knowledge at a faster rate. Although we may not become traditionally smart at through analyzing traditional text books like our parent’s generation did, we are becoming smart in a utilitarian manner. Without the internet, this would not be plausible. Thank you internet – you have made education more intensive, but also more effective.

Murph