In 1996, I had been using email for about six years and had just a year earlier paid $60 to take a course in how to use the Internet. I wasn’t stupid, either—lots of perfectly normal people were in the class with me. There weren’t as many sites to visit as there are now, though, and the connections were incredibly slow. It wasn’t until about two years later that I began wasting a really significant amount of time online.
When I ran across e-mail this book! (NC1426 .E2 1996), which the front cover describes as “the fun and foibles, the delights and dangers, the quirks and quarks, of life in Computerland,” what I wanted to see was whether computer-related humor had changed significantly since 1996. I’m assuming these computer jokes were funny back in 1996. Would they still be funny now?
One thing about 1996 that the book will remind you right away is that computer monitors were enormous, and fully functional yet affordable laptops were still a thing of the future: the unwieldiness of computers was a legitimate source of humor in 1996. In one cartoon, a very uncomfortable businessman has a desktop computer with enormous monitor perched on his lap: a salesman announces, “This is our laptop model.” Another cartoon features an airport location, with the airline announcer speaking over the public address system: “At this time we would like to pre-board those passengers with laptops over fifteen pounds.” There are no more laptops over fifteen pounds, so the joke no longer makes sense.
The book also reminds us that there were many fewer computer users in 1996 than there are today, and computer illiteracy was not a serious confession of inadequacy. A person who would say today, as one businessman says to another in s cartoon, “Bob, I have a terrible confession to make: not only am I not ‘on line,’ I don’t even know what ‘on line’ means …” would just seem pathetic—not funny.
It takes me a moment to understand a couple of the jokes, because the situations the cartoonists are suggesting as somewhat outrageous in 1996 are entirely normal now. In one cartoon, a guy is selling sodas at an outdoor portable stand under an umbrella—and there’s a computer on his stand. That doesn’t seem at all incongruous now. In another, a man is drinking his coffee and reading his morning newspaper online. The newspaper is formatted to look just like a real paper newspaper. Oh, wait a minute. That’s what The New York Times and USA Today look like every day!
Almost all the computer users in the book are businessmen, which is interesting since a huge subset of computer users consisted of administrative assistants doing word processing for their bosses. (There is, however, an outdated reference to WordPerfect.) `This may be a function of the book’s target audience.
All in all, e-mail this book! is still pretty funny. I wouldn’t have considered the book a cost-effective purchase, since it took about ten minutes to read from cover to cover, but I don’t consider it ten minutes wasted. This book comes with a CD-ROM that will let you print out or email most of the cartoons that are included in it. The fact that there are eight pages of instructions explaining how to use the CD-ROM is yet another indication of the changes our computer-use habits have gone through over the past fifteen years.
When I ran across e-mail this book! (NC1426 .E2 1996), which the front cover describes as “the fun and foibles, the delights and dangers, the quirks and quarks, of life in Computerland,” what I wanted to see was whether computer-related humor had changed significantly since 1996. I’m assuming these computer jokes were funny back in 1996. Would they still be funny now?
One thing about 1996 that the book will remind you right away is that computer monitors were enormous, and fully functional yet affordable laptops were still a thing of the future: the unwieldiness of computers was a legitimate source of humor in 1996. In one cartoon, a very uncomfortable businessman has a desktop computer with enormous monitor perched on his lap: a salesman announces, “This is our laptop model.” Another cartoon features an airport location, with the airline announcer speaking over the public address system: “At this time we would like to pre-board those passengers with laptops over fifteen pounds.” There are no more laptops over fifteen pounds, so the joke no longer makes sense.
The book also reminds us that there were many fewer computer users in 1996 than there are today, and computer illiteracy was not a serious confession of inadequacy. A person who would say today, as one businessman says to another in s cartoon, “Bob, I have a terrible confession to make: not only am I not ‘on line,’ I don’t even know what ‘on line’ means …” would just seem pathetic—not funny.
It takes me a moment to understand a couple of the jokes, because the situations the cartoonists are suggesting as somewhat outrageous in 1996 are entirely normal now. In one cartoon, a guy is selling sodas at an outdoor portable stand under an umbrella—and there’s a computer on his stand. That doesn’t seem at all incongruous now. In another, a man is drinking his coffee and reading his morning newspaper online. The newspaper is formatted to look just like a real paper newspaper. Oh, wait a minute. That’s what The New York Times and USA Today look like every day!
Almost all the computer users in the book are businessmen, which is interesting since a huge subset of computer users consisted of administrative assistants doing word processing for their bosses. (There is, however, an outdated reference to WordPerfect.) `This may be a function of the book’s target audience.
All in all, e-mail this book! is still pretty funny. I wouldn’t have considered the book a cost-effective purchase, since it took about ten minutes to read from cover to cover, but I don’t consider it ten minutes wasted. This book comes with a CD-ROM that will let you print out or email most of the cartoons that are included in it. The fact that there are eight pages of instructions explaining how to use the CD-ROM is yet another indication of the changes our computer-use habits have gone through over the past fifteen years.
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