By Today's Standards...

We bought our first real PC in about 1990.  It was a pretty much up to date machine with an 80286 processor, 40mb hard drive, 5 ¼ floppy drive, 3 ½ floppy drive, and 24 pin printer.  It had 1mb RAM and we early on bought a math co-processor for the motherboard.

The machine was loaded with a program that had a word processor, data base, and spreadsheet (Not Microsoft Office).  It also had a few other bells and whistles, and generally was a good machine on which to learn how a computer worked and get used to MS-DOS instructions.

We paid handsomely for the machine.  It seems to me like we paid about $2,000 for the machine all together.  At the time, it was the best thing since sliced bread, and we’ve never been without some kind of computing machine since then.

By today’s standards, however, a 286 computer with a 5 ¼ floppy is very quaint.  It’s old, slow, cumbersome, has no Internet capability, has a monochrome monitor, and no CD/DVD drive.  It will not know what to do with Windows software, and couldn’t handle Office or any of the other software of today (with the possible exception of  Solitaire).

I have to wonder if some of us have become, in many ways, like the 286 computer in the modern age.  We have our traditions, ideas, and dogmas.  We cling to the times when we were growing up as the “best of times.”  We wish we could go back to those times and often rue the day when something happened in our lives that changed everything.

No, things aren’t perfect today by any stretch of the imagination.  But we have, by the grace of God, made some substantial improvements.  We have integrated bathrooms and eateries.  We have effective treatments for strokes and heart attacks.  We’ve conquered smallpox and have substantially reduced the chances of contracting other illnesses.  The world no longer has an Iron Curtain.  Africa is no longer the “dark continent.”

And we’ve progressed in other, less tangible ways.  Our understanding of how the universe works has gotten more precise, even though there is much yet to learn.  Christians have effectively used mass media to spread the message of Jesus Christ.  And we’ve grown in how we understand and relate to others (if we’d only use what we now know).

I have no desire to go back to 1956, 1990, or any other year past.  I like it where I am, right now, in this place at this time.  The 286 computer has no place on my desk, or in my mind other than a memory.  Those who continually desire to live in the past do themselves and those they interact with a great disservice, and are usually not very pleasant to be around.  It’s one thing to reminisce; it’s quite another to live in that era.