A trip down the information highway.

ADA I was a lady, moored to a desk. Eight-inch, 80K floppies in two slots controlled her devices and stored documents. She weighed more than I did and she knew less.

She was sufficient.

ADA II had her own brain, one megabyte. She obeyed my commands right or wrong. What I put in came out in amber on a black screen. She didn't talk, balk, or fight. Her information is trapped inside/ five-inch diskettes.

ADA III: A mouse on a pad meant fewer keystrokes to learn. Work saved on those old three-inch disks disappeared. Now I print what's important. ADA IV brought Internet access and weathered the Y2K storm. CD drives came next.

The twenty-first century isn't passing me by. Going from floppy to flash to cyberspace only, I call my new computer SIRI not ADA. Her keys are so small that I want to cry.

I'll master the touch.

A grandson gives me a watch. He tells me, "Grandma, it's fun." I decide to decline. This gadget's too much. "Dear grandson, I'm grateful, but I need a watch I can see." Don't blame the era - Hypatia could Friend her.

I caution the generation they call millennial: When I was your age, I wrote cursive script on paper with pen and dialed a rotary phone. Technological change is perennial. It's move on or bust.

Think of me years down the road when you use a supercomputer the size of a grain and faster than light: Wherever else your information is stored, Put it on paper, or your history's dust.

BY ILSE NUSBAUM

ILSE NUSBAUM (University of Michigan) is the creative writing instructor at the Roxbury Community Center in Beverly Hills, California, editor of the community quarterly, and director of the class poetry chapbook and poetry reading. She studied creative writing as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College and as a graduate student at Michigan. A child refugee from Nazi Austria, she returned to Vienna in 2011 to pursue justice for students expelled from Austrian universities after the Anschluss. Her work culminated in a monument on the Vienna University of Economics and Business campus, a memorial book, an exhibition in the Jewish Museum of Vienna, and a chapter in an Austrian history book. The events of World War II and their consequences were the topic of her 60th Harvard/Radcliffe reunion symposium presentation in 2015. Contact her at [email protected].