Computers Are Tough Critters

Lots of people think that personal computers are fragile just because they are made up of lots of tiny electronic parts. The truth is that personal computers are pretty tough. It takes a lot to break a computer.

You would have to throw it out the window of your fourth floor apartment, or pour steaming hot coffee right down into the computer's innards, or leave the cover off the computer for six months, allowing an inch of dust and a medium-sized family of mice to move in.

No, personal computers are built pretty tough these days. Some companies even test their computers by dropping them onto a hard concrete floor.

You would never want to do this yourself, but you can just imagine how tough a computer must be to fall two or three feet and still work properly.That's tougher than most toasters and tape recorders. Probably even tougher than your little sister.

Which all goes to show that you shouldn't be afraid of hurting your personal computer. You can never, ever, hurt a computer by pressing one of its keys. (Unless you pressed the key with a stick of lighted dynamite.)

The worst that could ever happen is that you destroy the program in the computer's memory, or erase a program on the floppy disk. But if your floppy disk has a write-protect tab on it, there is no danger of erasing anything on the disk. And if you destroy the program in the computer's memory, you can always just switch off the computer and run the program again from the floppy disk.

So if you ever feel like experimenting with different keys on the computer, go right ahead. It's good to be curious about how things work. It's natural to want to explore what makes the computer do some things and not other things.

Everybody know that children like to explore. And adults like to explore too. It's only natural.

As a matter of fact, some of the best computer programmers are very curious people. They try all types of different things to make a computer do what they want it to do.

So if one way doesn't work, they'll try another way. And computers are tough critters, so they really don't mind . . . as long as you don't stick any lighted dynamite into the disk drive.

Phil Shapiro

Copyright 1995

All Rights Reserved



Internet: pshapiro@his.com]

Return to children's stories menu.