In 1995 or thereabouts, a friend of my family told my kids and me that soon there would be a phenomenon called “internet” that would make all the information in the world available “up there in the airwaves.” I still remember the sense of wonder that I felt: how could this be?
We Can Travel to Other Lands in Our Minds as We Read
As a child, I learned early (not long after I learned how to read) how fascinating information is, and that the world is filled with an endless variety of wonderful information and people and things, almost all of which was outside my neighborhood. Traveling to other lands by way of the books I read, I longed to continue to learn and to see. I became the person in my family that my brothers and sisters and even my parents came to in order to find out what was going on, within the realm of what it was possible for me to learn by keeping my eyes and ears open wherever I went, as well as the vast amount of information I could learn by reading.
I was fascinated by the dictionary with its history of words, and encyclopedias! Oh how amazing the descriptions of far-off lands and people and places! It went on forever. Then I discovered my school library’s different series of biographies of many people, those who had accomplished great things in medicine, in wartime, in helping to make the world a better place for all of us. There was no end to this information!
“Desk Set” — 1957
I saw an old movie one day, “Desk Set,” from 1957, one of the Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romances, and I loved the story. What I loved most about it, though, was not the romance but Hepburn’s job. She and some other ladies sat at desks and answered phones all day, phone calls from people asking random questions. Their job was to answer the questions, from a library of books and information at their command. What an interesting job it would be, I thought, to do this all day long, every day! And apparently these ladies thought so too, because the conflict in the movie was that Spencer Tracy as a computer expert was assigned the task of automating Hepburn’s department.
Computers!
It seemed he would bring in a computer, which at that time was a huge piece of equipment taking up a whole room and requiring temperatures too cold for ordinary humans to be in the same room with it, but capable of holding and dispensing information beyond the abilities of the ladies at the particular company concerned.
I won’t tell you what happened because maybe you like old Tracy/Hepburn movies and will see it one day, but it was humorous and lighthearted and very entertaining. I mostly remember the interesting job she had. I wanted one like that too!