My first experience with technology around education was writing a paper in my Bachelors using Microsoft Office 95. My major was Korean language and education so I had no idea about using computers back then. I started writing my paper in a blank word document and decided to save it to a floppy disk so that I can print the file at my school. Everything went great until my brother accidentally turned off the main power outlet. I was just devastated and almost cried since didn’t save the last 2 hours of work. I didn’t know about an AutoSave feature. Also, there was no YouTube to show how to recover MS word files back then. I was frustrated with the thought to starting the half of the paper again (there was AltaVista but no much-shared content on the Internet). However, I was so relieved to see the recovered file when started Word. I couldn’t thank you enough for Microsoft for the feature. It restored my faith in technology!
It always seems that forgetting to save is a re-occurring problem, maybe overconfident that would never happen. Your post made me wonder however whether modern luxuries of auto-save will be taken for granted as people expect computers to come with certain features, bypassing a second thought that it might be important to backup data to another location.
Andrew
Hi Andrew
I agree that we are so overconfident that technology will not break. We also forgot that technology is a human invention. There will be errors and mistakes in programming like any other equipment. Even backup strategies won’t work at some point. In my mind, it would be great we can store and extract information easily from our memories whenever we need. I bet there will be a technology to help us to do that one day but it brings out the same issue that technology could fail at some point.
YooYoung