I have been thinking about a couple of recent posts by Dorothea Salo. One of them, Training-wheels culture, has received a lot of attention (some of it even positive!). Another, The darn things grow on you, hasn’t. But I think that the second post–which has to do with the place of computers and technology in one’s life–has something to say about the first.

In my case, my dad bought an Apple ][+ for the family in 1982 when I was eleven years old. And when I say “the family,” I mean for him and me, because my mom didn’t really take to computers until email and eBay made them compelling to her.

Around the same time, I occasionally used a TRS-80 at school and at a friend’s house. As I remember, using the computer at school was a bit of a let-down, as it involved mathematics drills.

The situation with the Apple was better, as it came with some games like Olympic Decathlon and Adventure. But you couldn’t play those forever. And after a while, it was obvious that the computer itself was something worth playing with. What can you make the computer do?

I remember spending a long weekend afternoon with a friend, typing in the BASIC code for Hunt the Wumpus–perhaps from this very book (that mecha-wumpus looks awfully familiar)–on his borrowed TRS-80. Then we couldn’t get it to work. Then we couldn’t manage to save what we’d typed on the cassette tape drive.

I had more success with the Apple (and its floppy drive). I learned some Applesoft Basic programming and wrote lots of weird little half-finished programs–quiz games, graphics displays, that kind of thing.

Years later, one of my high school friends who went on to get a degree in engineering and work in computer hardware and computer security pointed out how great that situation was for those of us who were kids when the first wave of home computers hit. There was no Photoshop or iMovie to mess around with, no World Wide Web to hang out on. We had to make stuff up.

It meant that we didn’t really fear the computer. We’d crashed it before and we’d crash it again. I wasn’t a programming genius, but I knew the satisfaction of finding and fixing a small bug. The computer wasn’t going to do anything on its own; it was up to me to make it do something interesting.

I think about that sometimes when it seems like “computer literacy” has been shoved into a little tiny box that really means “knows how to use Microsoft Office products.” I think of computer literacy more as being able to screw something up and then figure it out and fix it. (This might be a good time to point out that the home page for this very blog was the GNU General Public License for a brief time yesterday; something always goes wrong when I upgrade WordPress.)

I also realize I was lucky to encounter computers when I had whole afternoons to waste trying to get them to do something weird, not as an office worker getting one dumped on me, and being told to learn how to be productive with it or risk losing my job.

Ideally, this would be the place where I divulged a sure-fire method to help turn people from thinking “let me write down exactly which menu option I need to memorize” to “I seem to have broken this in a particularly interesting way.” But I don’t have a good answer. Perhaps a little patience on both sides for those currently in the profession and a lot of impatience when it comes to new librarians and new hires. In other words, I’m willing to believe that those librarians Dorothea needed to help with the web forms have something else worthwhile to offer the library that outweighs some willful cluelessness, but I would do my damnedest not to hire any more people like that.