Most of us, myself included, don't really appreciate history in the making. It's just what's happening at the time and you're so involved that it's hard to get a real perspective on it until years later. Then you look back and think, "Wow . that was really an exciting time . I got to experience the birth of something that changed the world."That's pretty much my reaction now, almost fifty years after I saw my first computer. From those early hard-wired sorters and collators to massive, climate-controlled business computers all the way to personal computers and the Internet - it's been quite a ride.Pocket calculators, Macs, PCs, laptops, smart phones and tablet computers have become a necessity in our society.

My kids can't really even envision life without those electronic marvels. My two daughters were able to accept the fact that until I was six or seven my family didn't have a TV or an air conditioner, but when I hauled out my slide rule from college they thought I was kidding about having to use it to do advanced math. The idea of not having an electronic calculator handy was so foreign to them that the use of a mechanical gizmo like a slide rule seemed incredibly archaic.And I doubt they even remember that fateful day many years ago when I brought home a copy of AOL software and an acoustic coupler (a cradle that your telephone handset plugs into) and used our phone line to connect to the Internet. I had planned on using the computer and phone line on rare occasions to look up information I needed for work. It didn't take long for my wife and daughters to discover the world wide web though, and within a couple of months we had to have a separate phone line for the PC and I had to fight to even get on the computer. In no time we went from expecting the kids to simply use the PC to help with their school work to long hours spent in chat rooms using instant messaging networks. Eventually I gave up, got a second PC for home use and networked the two together so I could manage to get on the internet myself.

It used to be that if the TV went out that was a mini-crisis. Now though, the TV is a minor problem. If the computer goes belly up for some reason, near-panic sets in. There are Facebook pages to be kept current, crops to be harvested on Farmville, email messages to be read or sent, bank accounts to be checked, bills to be paid and online shopping to be done. Anymore home life largely revolves around our computers (and our smartphones). Hard to believe how much has happened in the world of home computing since those misty, long-forgotten pre-computer days.