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Steven Jobs, onetime boy computer genius, was telling a radio reporter the other evening that when he started out he never feared his business might fail because the old crocks of the world would refuse to adapt to the personal computer. Experience showed that children loved the things, and history, Mr. Jobs said, taught that sooner or later old crocks always died.

In short, he was in a business with a future. I sensed this too when personal computers first began burping and beeping all over the landscape. Though I hadn't yet heard of Steven Jobs, it was obvious that these machines would have to be faced unless I wanted to become an old crock and pass away.

I have decided not to do that. Pass away, that is. To implement this policy, I strenuously avoid old-crockhood. Naturally then, within days of first seeing youngsters playing happily with personal computers I acquired a personal computer for myself.

Learning to use it effectively didn't take nearly as much time and work as the average guy with a tin ear would need to learn the piano well enough to give a passable performance of Beethoven's "Apassionata" at an American Legion hall.

Once mastered, the personal computer turns out to be a very good invention. It is not only the best typewriter ever made, it is also a terrific dictationist, ringing up faraway telephones and reading them what I write, thus saving me a trip to the post office.

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People who make the things, however, still decline to eliminate their many unpleasant defects and nasty features. Mine, for example, seems to have an embarrassing case of dandruff. By picking up the keyboard, turning it upside down and banging it lightly on the table a few times, I can always collect a little pile of fine, white flaky material.

Whether this comes from the keyboard or from me is hard to say, and I prefer not to know. Much as I dislike the thought that minute fragments of me may be disappearing into the keyboard at a fairly steady rate, it's even more unpleasant to find yourself harboring a machine with dandruff.

Typewriters in the old-crock era never presented this problem because their keyboards didn't have floors attached underneath. Falling scalp, flaking fingertips, hangnails, fingernail dirt, beach sand, sweater lint -- whatever fell into a typewriter keyboard fell right on through and was never thought of again.

Even worse than the nasty detritus in the computer keyboard is the furry mess inside the main box, whatever they call it. I once had a professional come because my machine was in utter collapse. He opened the box and pulled out a lot of essential-looking hardware that was encased in tightly woven and revolting layers of hairy matter sucked out of the air over the years.

"You have to clean it out once in a while," he scolded, producing a minute vacuum cleaner. Sure you do, but when you get the screwdriver to open the thing up, what do you see? A warning that fooling around inside this box may be fatal.

It's bad enough dying because you've become an old crock. It would be downright humiliating to die of trying to avoid being an old crock.

If computers were half as miraculous as people like Mr. Jobs think they are, they'd come with interior self-cleaning systems that took that garbage out of there with the push of a button. If something as primitive as a cookstove can clean itself, why does something as futuristic as a computer make you risk death to get the lint out?

Now here's another terrible defect, and I don't mean the way they position the screen way up in the air miles from the keyboard so you have to keep bending your neck until you get a splitting headache, although that's really inexcusable.

The graver flaw, however, is that it doesn't make writing painful enough. Using the typewriter, you also had to use scissors, paste, staples and pencils whenever you changed your mind. It was hard work. People thought twice before writing 500- page books.

The computer makes writing so easy that nobody has to think at all before knocking off a 500-pager. Result: The typical 500-pager nowadays reads as though nobody had thought at all. My suggestion: a new system warning writers that they have reached the 300-page mark and that going over 330 will produce a death- dealing electronic assault. Perfection still awaits, Mr. Jobs.

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