You can give me your computers if you want. I’ll take them.

I like computers. I find them very useful.

Hi Paul, which computers do you hate (read want to get rid of). Hears rubbing of hands and evil laugh.

Come now Paul, how can you say that, without them you’d never have known me and I know that must be a distressing thought LOL.

Photoshop Rocks. But you can only play it on a computer. And Google is about the greatest invention of my time. Now you no longer have to wonder why something is, or who did what. You can know in seconds.

But if computers didn’t exist, I bet we’d all get out more. Of course that would lead to more driving, depleting our natural resources, and contributing to more poorly researched films by Al Gore.

Computers are the most loyal, devoted pieces of machinery ever invented. They only do exactly what they are instructed to do. The programmers that gave crappy instructions are where to place the blame. AT&T just took over Bellsouth, the company that provides my service. Somehow, without letting anyone know, they switched email servers. That wasted a few dozen hours of my time troubleshooting what was wrong with my machine before I found out, thanks to the internet, that it wasn’t my machine. It was them. The hilarious part is that after a few weeks of asking them what they did that caused the problem, they sent back a response with very basic instructions for how to send an email — something I have been doing quite successfully for a couple of decades before they came along. The problem still isn’t fixed. But at least I can send an email with an attachment again.

Paul if you really want to give it up though, I think I have some rubylith somewhere around here I’ll give you a deal on — xactos, triangles, blue leads, and some other dust collectors too.

Computers are good.

The Adobe Illustrator team’s last four releases, on the other hand...

Well, essentially, I really like computers, too—all the Macintoshes I’ve had, particularly, as they’ve enabled me to make a whole slew of books. But ... at various times I’ve learned to hate and despise software, tho’ not in a long time.

I once worked all night on a single-article issue of a science journal in order to FedEx it to the publisher for a rush get-out issue. Somewhere right around daybreak I did my last Save and PageMaker, bless its pointed little head, sent me a Bad Record Index error, would not save, wiped the article from my hard drive, and rendered my copies of the article useless the same way.

I was about to put my fist thru the computer’s screen—this was in the CRT monitor days until I thought better of it.

I’ve had moments like that also, where I just want to take the thing and crush it to dust, but then, I’ve broken pencils and torn and crumpled up pieces of paper too. These moments pass. Just take a deep breath & count to ten before giving yours away. :-)

I’ve felt this way, too, Paul. Russell’s got the right idea, though — go take a walk around the block, or better yet, in a park, where you can look at some grass and maybe even trees... It works for me, at least.

Computers are tools.

I am also a tool, so computers suit me fine.

Paul

The computer is only as good as the person operating it...

Hav

I remember all of these old guys working at the sign shops that could take “One Shot” paint and paint the most fantastic letters. Those vinyl plotters put them out of business.

I also remember the first demonstration I saw of digital photography around 1989. The camera was a huge video camera. It was plugged into a big computer and monitor. The photo took about five minutes as the red, green and blue channels each panned through their individual scans. Then it took another five minutes or so for the CPU to process the image. Needless to say still shots were all that could be taken. I think that camera cost something like $30,000. The little pocket cameras you can buy for a couple of hundred dollars today take a picture ten times better and a thousand times faster.

I won’t forget the reaction when I told the photo labs that they’d better start establishing a digital base. They completely discounted it saying, “there is no way a digital image can ever compete against continuous tone film photography.”

speaking of “the old days”...

I was hand cutting vynil and Rubylith films for a screen printing company in about ’82 or ’83, when I saw the first digital plotter for cutting vynil and Rubylith. It was so slow and could only cut arcs in something like 3.6 degree increments... I thought - “These things will NEVER replace a skilled guy like myself” :-)