How Personal Computers Have Changed The World

Mr. Grimes sits at the head of the table during dinner.  A warm, light-hearted person, he entertains his family with the joke about the guy who goes to heaven and sees the clocks that move when people lie (“Where’s George Bush’s clock?”  “Oh, Jesus keeps it in his office—he uses it for a ceiling fan.”). 

A law professor at Southwestern Law School and graduate of Stanford University, his hobbies include gardening, running, tennis and basketball, digital photography, biking, and cheering on the Stanford women's basketball team.  He is a blogger for a team fan site, and takes pictures at the games he attends and writes about those games online.  He lives with his wife and two daughters in a charming house in Glendale.

As a lawyer, computer technology has definitely helped him in his work.  As computers have progressed and advanced through the years, they have helped him more and more in his work, communication, and hobbies. 

I first began using computers around 1980 or shortly thereafter.  I bought a computer, and it was called a K-Pro and it only had about a nine inch screen.  It had a keyboard and I used it initially for word processing.  I got a version of Word Perfect, which is a writing program.  That was how I got my first computer, and I used it to write documents and store documents.  And then, about the same time I started using a computer in my work because I was a lawyer, and I used a computer with a bigger screen but also for the same reason, to write documents. 

I don’t remember exactly what it cost, but I suspect that this K-Pro cost well over a thousand dollars, and in those days, a thousand dollars was worth more than it is today.  Definitely, computers have come down in price, they’re much more affordable today than they were. 

Especially when you take account of how much more powerful they are, computers have come down in price.  That computer was very slow, and had very few capabilities.  Computers now are faster, more powerful, and all the different software that’s been developed for them has changed.  We didn’t have the Windows operating system, we had what’s called the DOS system. This operating system required you to type verbal instructions to the computer.  Apple was a competitor, and Apple came up with this much nicer system which let you use your mouse to click on an icon and do things.  Microsoft, the makers of DOS, quickly realized that DOS was slow and awkward compared to the point and click system Apple had.  They copied the Apple system and called it Windows, but Windows really was an attempt to copy what Apple had already done.  

Before I started using computers, I typed.  In fact before I used computers, when I drafted documents I would type them on a typewriter.  I probably type now with a computer than I used to with a typewriter, because I use the computer to send email messages and draft documents. 

Lawyers do a lot of writing, and using a computer means you have to hire fewer secretaries, because you can edit the documents themselves.  In the old days you used to draft the document, have a secretary type it up, and then you would go through another draft.  Because you couldn’t save the document, you had to retype it from scratch.  Nowadays, you put it on the computer memory, and you type it and print it out as many times as you want, and edit it as many times as you want.  So computers definitely make the job easier.

In the initial days of computers, they didn’t change the way I communicated with friends and relatives, because there wasn’t much connection between computers.  The Internet is what changed all that.  That ability to email and send messages back and forth and send documents back and forth on the Internet, that’s changed a lot.  Not only has it changed the way people communicate, but it’s made it so much easier.  Actually, it’s increased communication, I think, because it’s so easy to send someone an email, whether they live in Australia, Africa, South America, or next door in Pasadena.  In the old days, a lot of the communications you wouldn’t bother with because it was too onerous, too difficult to either telephone them, or send them a letter, or send them a telegraph, or some much more onerous technology.  If you call someone on the telephone, especially if they’re on the other side of the world, it’s very difficult to time a call so that you’re awake and they’re awake at the same time.  With emails, you just send it whenever you want to and they read it whenever they want to.  So I think the Internet has not only changed communication, but it’s enhanced it. 

Computers have changed the way I communicate with co-workers.  I teach at a law school, and a lot of communications between law professors are now by email.  When you type an email, you can send it to one person, two persons, seven persons, twenty persons, fifty persons, just by changing the way you address it. 

As a law professor, computers enter my classroom a certain amount.  Students are given a choice between writing their exams longhand or typing them.  When I was in law school, we were also given a choice, and I would say that then maybe only twenty or thirty percent would type their exams.  Now, when I’m grading exams, I would say that that proportion is reversed.  I’d say about seventy to eighty percent of the students use a computer, and maybe the other twenty percent still write longhand answers, so it’s really changed. 

At my school, we make videos of some lectures.  If the professor’s away, he or she can lecture and then using digital readouts they can present a lecture in various formats.  I don’t know if our school has gone so far as to make lectures available on iPods…After you finish law school you have to study for the bar examination, and you go to special bar review courses to review and get ready for the bar exam. And I’ve heard that the bar review lectures are sometimes made available on iPod.  Computers are also used in the classroom by some professors who use PowerPoint presentations.

I can think of two ways that computers have changed the way the industrialized world works, communicates, and functions.  One way is that people buy things online.  In the retail end of the economy, more and more things are purchased online.  It’s easier for a consumer to shop and compare prices sitting at their computer at home.  A big company like Amazon.com, which started out in books but now sells many kinds of products, they weren’t around fifteen years ago.  They’re a brand new type of retailer.

Another thing that comes to mind is what’s called B to B programs, which stands for business to business programs.  It’s for companies that buy things or sell things to each other.  Let’s say that the Ford Motor Company needs a new fuel injector for a car it’s building.  It can advertise on the B to B program that it needs the fuel injector of certain specifications, and it invites companies all over the world to bid to supply this product to the Ford Motor Company.  It’s nice for the Ford Motor Company,  because they can find out very quickly who might be interested in selling the fuel injection system very quickly, and it’s also nice for the companies that want to compete to sell.

One more thing about the computer industry is that we haven’t figured out what to do about the monopoly on operating systems that Microsoft has.  Except for the Apple computer which uses its own operating system, Microsoft pretty much dominates the operating systems used all over the world, so that’s a departure from competition.  Competition is supposed to bring down the price of all products and make sure that we as consumers have variety and choice  and price and quality levels, and that system hasn’t worked very well for computer operating systems, because it’s necessary for people to have the same operating system in order to maximize their ability to communicate back and forth and use all the programs that are out there.  Once Microsoft became the biggest and dominant company it made it very difficult for other companies with different operating systems to compete.  So that’s still an unresolved issue that we have to figure out how to make for more competition and choice in something like an operating system. 

Interviewed by Antonella Wilby