Interesting question.

Think about this. People got along before telephones. Lived fulfilling
lives. And I would not want to live without my telephone and wireless.
Besides convenience, there is sometimes the matter of life and death. I
bought my first cell fone because I never wanted to hear a law officer tell
me the bad news about my wife, and say that if they had known about her
accident a few minutes sooner, they might have saved her. I honestly got it
for just that reason.

We used to live by snail mail. Now we correspond with friends and relatives
several times a day by email. I don't want to go back on that one. I used to
manually run out twenty year and thirty year projections on loans. Hate to
do that again, it sometimes took me days. I used to keep address books on
paper. Took far more maintenance, and much of it did not get done because of
the cost in time to return value. My company used to keep multiple customer
file drawers. Every customer had four cards, so we could look them up based
on payment records, addresses, name, something else (I don't remember what
it was). Billing took over a week each month, now it is done in minutes.

My opinion is not that computers have slightly simplified our lives by doing
a few things faster, rather I believe we are doing more things, keeping
better records (for better or worse) and expanding our understanding to live
fuller lives. I compare it with when the electricity goes off. If it does so
for long enough, the water in the plumbing will go dry. At first it is a
major incontinence, then we make the emergency adjustments and live with it
until it is fixed. But practically no one wants to live like that.

Before computers we did the best we could with what we had. We are still
doing just that.

Mike

PS -- my computer corrected four spelling mistakes before I sent this.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harold B" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> I recently read comments like the following: I cant live
> without my computer. and What would I do without my
> computer. and often hear people (including myself) making
> similar comments  so I have to wonder, what did people do
> before 30 years ago when they had no computers? As I recall,
> life wasnt really so bad ... Harold
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