As I sat in front of my computer, trying desperately to break through a wall created by countless writer's blocks, I realized something:

I was sitting in front of a computer.

Talk about your dreams being realized a little too late. What I wouldn't have given for a computer back in elementary school! But back then it was more of an impossible dream that the pony for Christmas wish, because at least ponies were real; personal computers were just a concept.

I remember the first computer I ever saw; I was in first or second grade, and we had an astronaut come to speak at our school. (He apparently wasn't a very good astronaut, because it was his job to go speak in schools, not ride in rockets.) He had a computer with him, and he predicted (incorrectly, by 5 years or so) that everybody would have their own computer within 20 years.

At first, I thought his computer was cool because he could toss a handful of sand at a metal plate that was hooked up to it, and it would tell him how many grains of sand had hit it. But when he said that I might someday own my own, I was struck with a vision: the blessed No More Homework vision. I wasn't alone; I think every kid in school had the same vision, except possibly Ivan the genius Czechoslovakian kid, who thought computers would make school too easy.

The personal computer dream lived on for years; whenever we were swamped with homework, the conversation wasn't about why we should quit talking so much and get busy, it was about how cool it would be to have a computer that would do our homework for us, leaving us free to do important stuff. (Occasionally, we talked about how we could coerce Ivan into doing or homework for us, but that never worked either.)

We did realize that just having a computer wasn't enough. Sure, they came factory-delivered able to do stuff like count the grains in handfuls of sand that were tossed at them, but we needed them to be able to do math, to answer questions about history, and to have perfect spelling and grammar. We knew that if we ever got a computer of our own, we would have to program it to know what we needed it to know. But even that was a small price to pay, we thought, though we knew exactly nothing about what it would take to program a computer.

The first glimpse that the computer revolution was actually making it our way was in seventh grade, when my Dad came home with a calculator. It was a technical marvel that could actually do math for me! (It was also such a technical marvel that he paid over $400 for it, about a week before the prices dropped to about $9.95.)

Or so I thought; it did not take long to learn that using calculators to do homework was strictly forbidden, although my teachers weren't above borrowing it to add up all those numbers in their grade books, which I thought was extremely hypocritical of them. (Of course, I thought this silently and behind their backs.)

The personal computer revolution leveled off for a while after calculators were introduced to the public, which was probably a good thing, because I noticed that math teachers got around the problem of people doing their homework with calculators by asking the kinds of questions that calculators couldn't answer. (They called it "Algebra.") I never thought of computers again until my last year of high school, when a "computer club" was formed, and they raised enough money to buy a small personal computer. It was an Apple II with 32K bytes of RAM, a cassette tape recorder, and a black-and-white TV to use as a monitor. I wasn't sure what any of that meant, but I did think it was a cool toy because you could play computer hockey on it. There were no graphics to the game; you just read what the computer said, entered instructions when prompted ("shoot"), and read the results. It was because of that computer game that the phrase "Face save, and a beauty!" became part of my lexicon, which tells you how much I got out of the computer club.

After that came college, working, then more college, and somewhere in there I completely missed the computer revolution. Suddenly everyone had one and knew how to use it; I don't recall any computer classes even being offered when I was in college! I was suddenly a dinosaur.

I noticed a few things about the computer generation, though. For one thing, they were relying on it to tell them so many answers that they were forgetting the questions. Sure, it was telling them that they had misspelled some words, but not that they were using "to" instead of "too," "loose" instead of "lose," or "they" instead of "the." Computers, I surmised, make you stupid, or at least illiterate.

So naturally I jumped on the computer train. I got a small computer, took a basic Adult Education class ("So THAT'S how you turn it on!"), eventually upgraded when my Dad upgraded even further and gave me his hand-me-down, and finally became swallowed up by the computer revolution that had avoided me for so long.

And now? Here it is, years later, and I don't know if I could survive without my computer. Considering my core values and beliefs, I should hate myself for becoming what I swore I never would: dependent on a machine.

But, I cut myself some slack, because at least I'm not one of those people who are always on the cell phone, texting on their Blackberry, and so wired that they are now wireless. Me, I'm making efficient use of technology; those people are just sick. And I'll believe that right up until the day I… become one of them.