I was toting home my "luggable" (so called portable computer). That's correct, before the arrival of wholesale computers as little as a palm print, the luggable computer was an innovative invention - weighing in at about 30-40 pounds, it was the size of a small suitcase. It had a tiny screen that was about 3x5 attached to the central processing unit which in turn took up most of the rest of the contraption. The typing surface made up the lid of the 'suitcase". It was large size which signified just about the same thing it means today and it snapped onto the front, forming a handle to lug the whole thing around. When you plugged it in, after a bit of a wait, the miniature black screen would light up dimly with light green text and you could word process to your heart's content. You needed to be a little familiar with computer language because that is how you performed certain operations.

Where would you try to take it? Well, unlike your wholesale computer laptops that go with you on plane flights, bikes and to coffee shops, as a practical matter, you could only transport your luggable computer home. Then you would prepare some written materials, then carry it to the office again to plug into a leviathan parent computer and start up on your labors that way.

Doesn't sound like an advance, right? But think about it, the nearly portable was a huge innovation from the back room full of key punch card machines that had signaled the commencement of the computer era only a short time before. Take home a computer? That was just amazing!

And that was the start of the work no matter what mentality that has now descended upon us all. In the old days, before the wholesale computer technological revolution and the other inventions in things like cell phone technology and email, netbooks and notebooks, and MACS, you could control to a boss, a client, anybody. Then you had easy excuses: "I won't be able to work on that until I can get to a computer." "The check in in the mail." "I won't be near a phone." "Can you put it on the teletype?"

In short, then, you were not expected to work day and night. You could not respond instantly because the tools simply did not allow it. Now that it does, workers are so supremely content with their wholesale computers and other fancy electronic gadgets, do they know it means they have to multitask each second of every day? Wow, little did I know my luggable was the start of no pauses, no time off, no intervals.

Progress or a set back?!