My parents gave me a real shock over spring break. While most people’s parents’ version of shock would include arbitrarily moving to Abu Dhabi or having another kid, my parents did something entirely less believable.

They bought a computer.

I thought my father was just kidding when I spoke to him over the phone a week before spring break and he mentioned that he and Mom were finally going to flirt with the cutting edge.

I admit, I was pretty skeptical.

My parents are the people who do not have cable, opting to watch only Iowa Public Television. When my peers talk about TV shows they watched growing up, I do this sort of blank look thing. While they were watching “90210” I was watching “This Old House.”

Someday, when I have to caulk a bathtub, I’ll gloat smugly, but I’m not looking forward to subsequent editions of trivial pursuit that quiz players on “Friends” or “Seinfeld.”

I am just accustomed to dire technological uncoolness.

I stopped at home briefly over the break and my dad ushered me into the spare bedroom. There, basking in its binary aura, was my parent’s symbol of arrival in the digital age. Dad was pretty pumped about his new scanner/printer/copier machine, which he had already tested out by making a giant poster of my sister’s old school picture and slyly hanging it in her bedroom. He had also set a picture of our sleeping cat as wallpaper, and I wondered how long it had taken him to do.

When I asked him whether or not they were going to get – gasp – online, my dad replied with his quintessential nonchalance. “Well, between games of solitaire and scanning the cat, I don’t know if I’d have much time to be online.”

Still suspicious, I hypothesized that maybe my parents had really borrowed the computer, set it up for the day I was home and would return it the next day, laughing all the way back.

I maintained my skepticism until after spring break, when I received an e-mail with the subject “Dad On-line.” Who are you, and what did you do to the people who raised me?

As anyone who has watched me work at a computer can attest, my techno-savvy doesn’t make me a threat to, say, national security. But I can do things like cut and paste, which made me infinitely more computer literate than my parents.

Until now.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve become engaged in a spirited electronic postcard duel with my dad, and he’s even managed to send me an attachment. I know this is a giant leap for computer-come-lately parents. One of my friends received an e-mail from his mom asking what the paper clip meant, and I’m really proud that my parents not only figured out what the paper clip meant, but they managed to send one to me.

The entire experience has caused me to take a stroll down memory lane and wax nostalgic about my first encounters with computers.

I remember in second grade, when one day an Apple II e appeared in the back of our class. I remember getting in trouble for being turned around in my seat to stare at it – while it was shut off.

We had about 15 minutes once a month to hone our marksmanship as we struggled for our survival on the Oregon Trail. Squirrel stew, cholera and broken wagon axles peppered our first encounter with the computers.

Later elementary years brought dot-matrix greeting cards and scripty banners on the computer paper that jammed in the back of our class and brought our lessons to a screeching halt.

My freshman year of high school I came down to Iowa State for a 4-H conference and somehow ended up in a session regarding the Internet. That was back in the day when the Des Moines Register ran stories about “the information superhighway” and had to spell out “electronic mail.”

Back in the day, we “surfed the Web” with the now-antiquated Gopher. The screen display was that tantalizing nuclear green glowing ominously from a black screen. Items appeared as folders within folders within folders. It crashed. Religiously.

When I got back to my hometown, I excitedly told my parents that I had gotten on the Internet and had managed to read the town council minutes for Auckland, New Zealand. These events should have been an omen that time on the Web is often neither productive nor relevant, but somehow you can get sucked in and learn all sorts of things you never thought about before.

I would not have imagined that during college I could sit in my bathrobe at the computer at 1:30 a.m., chat with friends in Kenya, sign up for a free trip to Iceland and listen to the soundtrack that just won at the Oscars.

Between visits to Iceland’s Tourism Bureau and chats with my pals in Kenya, I managed to squeeze in a little homework for my Science and Technology Policy class, wherein I discovered the possibilities of Natural Language. Linguists, lexicographers and computer scientists are joining forces to create computer software that can understand and respond to the nuances of spoken language.

The innovators foresee using this technology to enable people to talk to their computers and receive feedback. Not only are researchers developing programs in Chinese, English, Spanish, French and German, but the technology may allow smaller computers, access to more people and greater computer use for people with disabilities, in addition to eliminating the keyboard.

I do not foresee my folks investing in any natural language software when it comes out. For the time being, I would like to convince them to get the latest version of Oregon Trail.

Rachel Faber is a senior in agronomy from www.emmetsburg.iowa