On August 10th, another spanking new computer was delivered to an Ennis address, one of the 4,500 private residences in Telecom's Information Age Town which have applied for a computer to date. This particular box of tricks went to a 76-year-old Ennis citizen, my dad, Joe Boland.
A year ago, my father would have felt about as delighted to be left alone with a computer, as with a tarantula. A year later, the computer is now literally part of the furniture. A couple of weeks ago, he sent me his first email.
"Would I have got a computer if Ennis wasn't the Information Age Town? No, definitely not," he admits. "Without that incentive - and the training, of course - I couldn't see myself wanting to buy one." This Thursday will mark the first anniversary of the announcement that Ennis was to become Telecom Eireann's Information Age Town. As winners of the competition, £15 million has been allocated towards making the town's businesses, schools, public service bodies and households technologically literate, an experiment likely to be watched and analysed for years to come.
Before the computers were allocated to households interested in participating, one person in each household was obliged first to complete a short user-test, or undergo eight hours of training. Almost exactly half the 4,500 households chose the test, and the other half the training.
"I thought getting a computer would be a new opportunity to stimulate my mind, and a new interest," says Joe. "My main interests now are travel, history, and books, so that's what I'd be focusing in on for the Internet." "There's a particular book I've been searching for for years, one of James Boswell's Journals, and I'm hoping I'll track that down via the Internet somehow.
"And I know foreign tourist offices have web-sites, so I'll be able to research areas we'd be interested in travelling to, as well as checking train timetables over there. Usually, we'd have to wait until we arrived somewhere before we could check these things.
"As for the history, I'm really interested in Napoleon, and when I looked up web-sites for him on Yahoo, it was almost bewildering, the amount of information that came up. Having a computer is certainly opening up new horizons, but I wouldn't like to think it was going to take over my day, or that I'd feel obliged to use it every day.
"Only one person from the house could go on the course, so when I feel more confident with using the computer, I'm going to teach Catherine (his wife) everything I know. She's really interested, and all set to go exploring.."
All Ennis households which want to take up the offer of computers can do so for the sum of £260. This sum buys the computer (but not a printer), with software packages Windows 95 and Microsoft Office, as well as a modem Internet connection, three email addresses and free rental of these for the first year.
