COMPUTERS


Innocuous at first, but with ever

increasing stealth and speed,

has this electronic concept

developed through scientific

wartime necessity, permeated

the fabric of our entire society.

With bits and bytes,

zeroes and ones,

memory boards, chips

and rams, monitors,

peripherals, and endless

programming languages,

we wind our way through

basic cores, data bases and

gigabit files, to cyberspace,

the Internet, and

electronic mail, hurtling

through space from one

server to the next at

nanosecond speed,

and now then what.

Innovations, improvements

unabated, speeds, versatility,

miniaturization, artificial

intelligence, robotics, progress

on every scientific front,

till such time comes that

nothing can be done, including

the living of our lives, without

the pervasive presence of

computer processed work

and computerized information.




What about us, are we

being programmed successfully

to cope with all the aspects

of our new technology;

The brightest among us

greatly benefit, while those

more average, in value

decrease and lose out a bit.

There is virtually no place in

our society that is even now

untouched by computer technology.

Can you imagine this revolutionary

trend ten, twenty, fifty years from now;

will we be able to laugh at ourselves,

chuckle at the snail´s pace that we went.

Let us fervently hope so, for if not, many

of us will permanently be obsolescent,

if not totally obsolete.

HERBERT HOLZBAUER
© February 1997