The Undo Button

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to work with computers.  I’m not sure why that became my life’s ambition but when it came time to declare mine for my senior yearbook I said, “to go to college and become a computer technician.”  This was way back in the day before there were personal computers, smart phones and the Internet available to everyone.  When I went to college, they didn’t even have a computer degree so I settled on math and hoped I would be able to parlay that into a computer career.  My first experience with a computer was a remote connection through a phone line with the phone receiver resting in a modem cradle and my only means of communication a modified keyboard and a printer that allowed me to send and receive commands from the system at the other end. 

My first college experience didn’t last too long and a year later I found myself headed to the local community college.  But they were cutting edge!  They had what they called a data processing degree, which was really all about programming computers.  I learned the basics of such timeless computer languages as Cobol, Fortran and RPG.  I dabbled in Basic Assembler Language.  And for the first year I became the master of punch cards, learning the hard way to make sure I used the first columns on the card to punch in the line number of my program so when I dropped them I could easily sort them back into order again.  By year two we had a new system at the school and I was introduced to dumb terminals.  And that year we also were delighted to have a lab set up with several TRS80 Model 1 personal computers.  And they had their own drive that you could put your floppy disk into and actually save copies of your work!

And it has been a whirlwind since then.  Now we have more computing power on our wrists in our smart watches than our entire school had back then.  And while there were few of us interested in the field when I first started, now elementary school students are more tech savvy than we could have ever imagined!  With the advances of technology we have seen so many aspects of our lives made more convenient and improved.  And never in history has information been as accessible as it today.  And with artificial intelligence developing at a rapid pace we likely will be amazed at what is available in the future.

With all of the changes I have seen in the world of technology in the 45 years I have been involved in it, probably nothing has been as amazing and as valuable to me as the undo button.  My Dad encouraged me to take typing in high school because he said it would serve me well to be able to type.  And he was a visionary.  I didn’t think so when I was one of two or three males in a class full of females, but it has proven to be invaluable to me in my chosen career.  On those early typewriters we had no choice but to pull out the correction tape when we made a mistake.  When we moved to electric machines, some models had the correction tape built in and you just hit the backspace to overstrike what you had written.  But with computers the undo button has allowed us to simply erase with one keystroke or mouse click.  And a mistake can be corrected in no time. What a great time saver!

There have been many times in my life that I wish I had an undo button to erase something I did or said.  Unfortunately, such a tool does not exist.  Hurtful things I might have said to my spouse, my child, my parent or my friend can never be retracted.  Foolish decisions and actions I have made and done can never be made to disappear.  They will always be in my mind’s memory banks, as well as in the memories of those who heard or witnessed me. 

But the good news is that we can have the wrongs we have committed taken away.  They can be removed as far away from us as the east is from the west.  They can be forgotten by God and no longer counted against us.  And that happens when we believe in Jesus as our Lord, seek genuine change in our life through repentance, are obedient to him through baptism and allow his blood to blot out our sins, to be remembered no more.  Even better than an undo button is an undone life that has been restored to pristine condition through the love God has for us.  And that, my friends, certainly does compute with this old tech guy.

-Phil Miller

Previous
Previous

The Losing Streak Broken at the Cross

Next
Next

More Than Words