There is a whole new world opening up and we’re late starting. The new world I’m talking about is computers. Everyone’s seen them. You know the one sitting in your closet which you bought five to 10 years ago. You took it out of the box thinking of the possibilities of how you could use it, but you had to be fluent in computer language, Klingon or whatever.

So you just ended up playing video games on it until you got your Nintendo. Then it ended up in your closet. Well, now things are different. Now there’s Mac’s, 486’s, Pentium, laptop, cache, non-cache, megs, Soundblaster, Deskjet, laser, MHz, ROM-RAM, virtual memory, mouse and, of course, DOOM.

But things are simpler, honest. Nowy ou can virtually turn on the computer out of the box and start typing away and do your school project, your business proposal, work on spread sheets, daily planner, fax, e-mail and of course put out a magazine. With a DOS-Windows program you can just point the mouse and get basically whatever you need without using an instruction book. Everything’s on screen.

There are different types of programs you can get. Pagemaker, Wordperfect, Coreldraw… depending on what you want to do. It doesn’t come cheap though. Be prepared to pay $2000 for a really good system. The basic system consists of a screen, keyboard, mouse, printer if you want to print and a box for the brains and memory which is the hard drive and CPU. That’s where cache, non-cache, megs, ROM-RAM, etc. come in. It depends on what you want to spend. The point of all these things is to make it go faster. Speed is the bottom line.

Another interesting little toy is the fax/ modem. This piece of hardware lets you talk to other computer operators through the phone line. There are BBS’s which are bulletin boards. Just dial up and there are hundreds of topics to choose from. You can read up on what’s happening in Mexico with eyewitness accounts of the uprising. A debate or question in religion, politics, philosophy, social, health, feminism, native issues or just exchange a recipe, and best of all you can reply to everything.

Everyone who posts in the BBS is just like you and me, only they have access to the technology. The potential is there to reach thousands if not millions of people. Just pay your $60 annual membership fee and you’re hooked in. So in the coming weeks, we will give you an introduction to the different aspects of computers.

Technology is developing at a rapid rate. But before we adopt any of it, we must meet it on our terms. So we can adapt it for our needs-not let it takeaway from our culture but enrich it with Cree way of thinking (Eeyou ditaaitimuun). So let’s all plug in and join the new world. By the way, DOOM is this really cool game where you get to…