History of Computers –Ellen Armitstead

Ellen Armitstead , 61 years old born in Glendale, CA. She lives with her husband in Burbank, CA. Growing up she lived in Burbank , but when she got married she moved to North Hollywood, then after moved back to Burbank. Her husbands name is Gary , they have been married for 36 years, they have two daughters and 1 son . She’s interested in gardening but doesn’t have the time to spend on her garden, because most of the time she’s at her job. Through out her life she’s had many jobs like secretary for aircrafts supply corporation, but her main job has been to teach. She was one of the first teachers in Wilson middle school and also Clark Magnet High school. A big change in her life has been computers for both her life and career. She was given a reword at Wilson for being the person responsible for bringing computers to Wilson middle School.

My first contact with computers was um back in 1980. I was curious about computers when they first became available to the general public, there were computers before I came in contact with them, but they were only used by big corporations, or US government or other countries that could afford to purchase the machine. The computer is a fascinating piece of technology, it certainly has, uh brightened up I think my life , and everybody’s life. I find it enjoyable to like search the web or go to the computer and ask questions about things, maybe I need more information and um its, its, great for keeping track of date , like class lists. You know just um kind like tedious things that a computer doesn’t complain about .I like word processing too , my hand writing is pretty bad. In my career , im I was a teacher before computers came along, but I think what computers have done in some instances, have made , made , my career, um more organized and, keeping data organized, I think the computer does a good job of doing that . I also like the email feature of the computer , because I’m able to keep in touch with my colleague’s, and get information back and forth a lot quicker then it I had mailed it , or had to go to the telephone.

When computers started becoming available for a few hundred dollars, I purchased something called the P.E.T., P E T , which stands for I believe, personal electronic transacter, or I forgot what the T stands for. It was a very simple computer , it um it had I think, I don’t know it was like 20 , 20 bites of memory, I forget it was like an absurd small amount of memory, so you couldn’t do a hack of allot with it. There were no software programs for it at the time, you had to program the computer yourself using basic programing language, but, but it was kind of fun to play around with this computers . You could do like a flow cart, you could do a set of instructions, and have the computer for instance, generate a random number, and I can remember doing a project, I would have my students write a simple programs that would write there names infinitely many times. 

Computers are and absolute necessity, we can not get along without them, they have been a time saver , problem solvers. Without computers things that we have in our world like medical research, communication, and oh entertainment , special effects , computer graphics wouldn’t be here. So yea computers are very good things.

Yes , I think I can live without computers , I was living before computers and I would live after computers, the word live , would I miss them , would it be a hardship on me if I didn’t have computers? I don’t know what kind of a hard ship it would be on me , maybe it would take me longer to do things . I might indicate that it might be a hardship on my husband, because his a diabatic and he keeps track of his blood sugar and other kinds of testing he does on the computer. When he uses the computer he has more accurate recordings then when he used to do it by hand. I rather talk about how without computers it would be a hardship on everybody not just me. I think I can make do without them, just like when I make do without electricity when the power goes off. When lights go out you can do things in the daylight or light candles or something , you could always find a different way to get something done. Its just computers do things so efficiently and faster then other ways of doing things that we all get used to the new way of doing it. Its easer to have a maid make your bed then to make it yourself, but that doesn’t mean you cant make your bed yourself if you had to. 

Its been a fascinating , very interesting, an amazing journey, to think that early computers were just solving inventory problems or analyzing some data to using computers to further the human genome. Iv seen the technology progress, just like you in your shorter amount of years, you think about some spacial effects you’ve seen in a motion picture from a while a go to the special effects created know, we’ve almost become intolerant of cheese special effects in older movies because were demanding better we expect better and we know its out their. In a movie point of view I suppose it would become difficult in the future to actual decipher weather or not something is real. So much computer generation or computer manipulation has been done to an image or something that you cant even tell that what your looking at is the actual thing. The saying "Seeing is believing" is definitely not gone hold any water. Its been fun watching things progress. That’s it.

Interviewed by Sipan Zadoryan