Your First PC

Let's say you're of a certain age. Your first memories do NOT include a personal computer in the house. You knew that everybody had one, your kids got them, they kept telling you to get one, but somehow you managed quite nicely without one, thank you.

Until now. For one reason or another -- maybe you realize it's the only way to have frequent contact by email with your kids -- you have finally decided to take the plunge and get a home computer.

OK, so you're late to the game. But maybe that will be an advantage, you think. They've been working on these things for a generation, so they're bound to be a lot easier to use now, right?

Well, yes and no. It's true that kinks have been ironed out of a few things. But there are many aspects of personal computers that are still pretty odd. One problem is the terminology that seems fiendishly designed to obscure rather than clarify.

For example, starting and stopping. As you've learned by now if you have a Windows PC, when you want to stop, you have to click Start! Patently absurd, of course, but essential to understand. On an older Macintosh, if you wanted to eject a flopyy disk, you had to drag the disk icon to the trash!

Dig a little a deeper, try to become conversant with the language of personal computers, and you encounter additional oddities. You might learn, for example, that computers have "memory," made of silicon microchips, and "storage" consisting of disk drives, some of which are "hard" and stay put, and others that are "floppy" and removable. (Actually, floppies are almost extinct these days.)

But how about the CD-ROM? The CD part, of course, refers to "Compact Disk," though almost nobody remembers the monstrous 12-inch video disks in comparison to which these are considered "compact." But what about the ROM part? This stands for "read-only memory." Of course, a CD-ROM is not memory at all, but we still call it that. You just have know these things.