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Untitled
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 ZZ: How did you come to be a writer with a specialty in computers?
RR: I think somehow I must have had a sixth sense about what was going to happen. I was at home with a brand new baby, and I had to figure out something to do. I was writing magazine articles (this is 1983) using my typewriter. My husband was in computer graphics at the very start, and they told him at work he could bring home a terminal -- a terminal connected to a UNIX machine, so he could spend more time with our new baby.
We had a one-bedroom apartment, and he brings home a terminal. I'm sitting there typing and playing with my baby, and all of a sudden I realized this man knows something I don't. And he is having such a good time, and he says to me, 'Why don't you write, using the computer? I'll teach you.' And he teaches me UNIX and vi. Because I loved him I learned it.
I ended up writing my first piece about computers. It was sort of a 'How I Learned About Computers to Save our Marriage.' I learned because I knew I wouldn't be a part of his life if I hadn't learned. And as I learned, I realized that if I learned this, I would control my life to a degree that I never could before, and that women in general had to make decisions about having kids and staying home or working. If they learned computers, the world was going to be their oyster. So that's what I wrote about. I said to myself, 'I know that someday having learned this is going to change my whole life, and let me call my shots.'
ZZ: So how many computers do you have in your house now, and who uses them, and for what?
RR: My kids are the first-generation digital kids. They've been brought up with computers since they were all babies. They are all teenagers now. Everybody has their own computer, and then we have a few to spare. They are all networked together. As a matter of fact our ISP went down last night, and we had our own little taste of the millennium bug.
It was interesting, not being connected, because it's only then that you realize how much a part of your life the Internet has become, whether we're looking up something to cook for dinner, looking up summer jobs, which is very big right now in our family, or looking for colleges. It's all done on the Internet in the evening.
My kids actually laugh at me for writing FamilyPC, because they say, "Who needs a magazine? Everybody knows how to do this." They don't even know that there was a time when computers weren't a part of somebody's life.
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"I'm sitting there typing and playing with my baby..."
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Robin Raskin
;)
