The latest YouTube video in the delightfully funny “Kids React to Technology” series by Fine Brothers Productions features kids encountering computers from the 1970s for the very first time. The beige, boxy objects with black screens and floppy disks might as well be an alien life form to these bright, fresh faced kids. The kids are very adept with all things technological, and are very young and adorable.
I admit their intelligent adorability although it paints me as a monster when I admit that I was looking forward to enjoying a bit of schadenfreude along with this video. Before you judge, I remember long ago when I first timidly placed my fingers upon a keyboard. I truly thought you could ‘blow up’ a computer. People said you could lose all of your work…Maybe even your programs if you pushed the wrong combination of buttons! And so, it is with admiration and envy that I watch the wee ones who are so naturally adept.
While schadenfreude is too strong of a word, it is highly amusing to watch as these extremely bright kids learn about the monster sitting on the desk, and find it seriously lacking! To their credit, they’re engaged and determined to master the beast – which they do…Although only one would like to take the monster home, as more of a collector’s item or curiosity. The general consensus is that it’s worthless!
It’s great fun to watch them as they discover how to turn the thing on – for one thing. After that hurdle, what’s DOS? Faced with no internet, no games and a lot of ERROR messages, what possible good can it do – rather, what did it do? They gain a bleak picture of the ‘old days’ as they discover what life must have been like. With no more memory than a modern computer uses to store one song, only the most rudimentary games are possible, on what was a very expensive machine!
For those who are interested, there is a running dialogue box which gives you all of the nitty gritty from the first gigantic IBM punch card computers to the present.
. Homework – impossibly, would be done at the library, of all places! Finally, we come to communication. With no internet, we have none of the obvious means that they have grown up using…This leaves us the telephone. The dumb one, it only makes and receives phone calls, and they don’t know how to use it…In fact, they have never laid eyes on it. JOY!
Join me in the next (and funniest) episode where the kids are dumbfounded by a rotary phone!
Unbelievably, the simple staple of most of our lives presents much more of a challenge for these clever kids than the stubborn Error laden computer ever did! Stay tuned this week !