Pat Martin now at the age of seventy lives in Sunland California. She has spent her life living in the United States. She now spends most of her time at home on a nice quiet street. She has spent the bulk of her life working for a living and a lot of that at the Los Angeles courthouse but she always knew what was going on in the world around her. You could call her the average woman if you so chose. If you ask her about anything she will have a story about it but you don’t mind listening to the stories because they are interesting and they make you want to hear more. She is up on the times and knows about technology at least somewhat but just cant seem to set her computer clock correctly. She is curious about what it will be like for her grandchildren as they grow up.

Well I have been thinking about this for a week now and my original answer was going to be Penicillin because it’s a very simple medicine but up until the 1940s it didn’t exist. It hadn’t been discovered or if it had been discovered it wasn’t available and people were dieing of simple infections. If you had a sore throat, a tooth pulled, appendicitis it would rupture, a cut. So I thought penicillin, dead on because it saved so many lives but as great as that was there were other things that were as equally as great. Polio invention the discovery of the polio vaccine. So I thought and I thought and there’s jet planes and there’s television and while television was really an impact on the country and every ones lives and their homes it would have to be the computer chip. The technology that enabled somebody to discover the computer and that where we have gone with the computer. There is an-there isn’t a product or any kind of process or any kind of a product or kind of a business that isn’t dependant on computers.

Either for information or to run machines for packaging. Think in terms of education, what computers have done for education. Yea we use computers in the classroom all the time. Absolutely, and you have access to all the great libraries, art museums. You could go online and search for anything in the world and you’ll find it. Uh, they have cameras on cruse ships and you can see when they dock in ports, in real time.

National Geographic has cameras all over the place watching wild animals. Migrations. For a year up in Alaska they had a camera at the salmon spawning grounds watching the bears pulling the salmon out. That’s incredible. Um, it has to be the computer its an incredible boom to civilization. But with it is the dark side which is the responsibility of it and there’s bad things that go with it for every good thing that we get there’s something bad that goes with it. Or sexual predators that use the internet. Um, yea so nothing is free there’s no great advance.

Yea, in my day when I was younger I had great freedom. I walked to school, I walked everywhere, I took buses, I traveled by myself. I had great freedom to do things. Kids have lost that freedom because there’s so much freedom that its very dangerous and nowadays kids are not allowed to do what we were allowed to do. I don’t know whether it wasn’t as dangerous or we just weren’t as aware. Probably we weren’t as aware of the dangers. We’ll never really know. Its not really one of those things you can measure. But um the computer really is just an incredible, incredible system we have to use.

It sort of didn’t start with a bang. It sort of started with a low hum. You know like oh yes there were computers. Back in the forties you know there were huge computers that took up whole buildings and um. Just cant even imagine that they were like the computers of today. Much larger and very limited in what they could do. They were sort of like a sorting machine. You know key punch sort of things. Cards, you could insert card kind of things. And its kind of amusing that that was kind of the forerunner but, but it was and um intellect caught up to, caught up to it as people started imagining, imagining what we could do. Well if we can do this maybe we can do that um and people everywhere were sort of going well maybe we can do this maybe we can do that in their garages, in their workshops. Trying to figure out how they can do it faster, better, more streamlined. I can remember at work when we first got our first computers and we were so excited. They were so limited as to what they could do.

They were IBM’s originally, yea well all computers at that time, or most of them were IBM’s. Um yea but they were just sort of glorified typewriters really. You know they were great because you know you could edit your document without ever having to print it. You could view it and edit it but they were sort of like electronic typewriters but a little bit classier. It was dos and um we couldn’t talk to one another. Interpreters couldn’t talk together and they weren’t hooked up except they would be hooked up to one printer. That was “the network.” You would have four computers hooked up to one printer. And they were very pricy at that time. It was very pricy to have one in your own home, not many people did.

Oh yea I had forgotten about Xerox until now. Yea they were big, IBM of course was… but I don’t know what happened. They sort of like didn’t take the next step apparently. They were so locked into gee this is great we are doing really well here. I think that they probably still do have computers but I’m not even sure that they still do them.

Yea its incredible. I um I’m sitting here trying to think of something and a couple of weeks ago I was trying to think of the name of a song and all I had in my head was a couple of lines. I was trying to think of what’s that called? Who sang that? And it was in my head and I was thinking that I could ask your mom or ask aunt Lisa because they both are really into music. Then I thought oh I’ll call aunt Lisa but then I thought maybe I’ll email her. So then I went to the computer to email her and I thought wait a minute why don’t I just search for it on the internet? Then I thought well you don’t know the name of the song oh ill just put in the words for it and do a search to see if I get a hit. So I did that and I got a gazillion hits and it says do you want it by this artist or that artist or do you want who wrote it and I just thought jeez I just want to know what the name of the song is. So I went in found the song and I played it and I thought that was really fun. So things like that you could just go, or if you want the recipe for something, and I have a gazillion cookbooks but the other way is faster. Search for a recipe and bang you get all these hits there it is.

Because without jet fuel you cant have jet planes. And they were designing the rockets but they didn’t have the fuel.

Its… everything is interconnected. I think another thing computers have done, and television started this, is that it made our boundaries smaller when before we had television we kind of knew what other places looked like from news reels, magazines, and books but having television you could see places and see things and it made our borders smaller. We could see what was happening in New York as it was happening. The computer has now made the world… we can see Iraq live, the north pole live. But it doesn’t give you the 360 degrees meeting the people and talking to them but it does give you like, that’s some place I would like to go to. I’m trying to imagine the next seventy years and I don’t think it will be as big of a leap.

When I was a kid we had party line phones they were like two or three people on one phone line. And we didn’t have washers and dryers like we do now you had to physically put the clothes in and take them out. And we didn’t have a refrigerator until I was like twelve, we had an ice box. We would put a sigh in the window saying we needed ice. We could play out in the streets. That’s what I miss you don’t see kids playing out in the streets out playing baseball or jumping rope or whatever they have. They are in their houses on the computer not outside roller-skating. We were outside playing hopscotch or all kinds of tag.

The computer chip changed neighborhoods, changed people, changed recreation. If you didn’t have the computer what would you do?

Interviewed by Zach Bolan