Today’s Word of the Day, courtesy of the Word of the Day app, is indolent. According to the app, indolent is an adjective meaning “showing a tendency to avoid hard work; habitually lazy.” According to www.etymonline.com, the word enters the language in the 1660s, with the sense of “’causing no pain, painless,’ from French indolent (16c.) or directly from Late Latin indolentem (see indolence). Sense of ‘living easily, slothful,’ is 1710, a sense perhaps developed in French.”

Under indolence, we learn that it derives from the “abstract noun from Latin indolentem (nominative indolens) ‘insensitive to pain,’ from in- ‘not, opposite of, without’ (see in- (1)) + dolentem (nominative dolens) ‘grieving,’ present participle of dolere ‘suffer pain, grieve’ (see doleful). Originally of prisoners under torture, etc. The intermediate sense ‘state of rest or ease neither pleasant nor painful’ (1650s) is now obsolete as well; main modern sense of ‘laziness, love of ease’ (1710) perhaps reflects the notion of avoiding trouble (compare taking pains ‘working hard, striving (to do).’”

Two things happened on this date 42 years ago that seem somehow, in my mind at least, related. The first is that Apple went public, and in a big way. The formerly private company had its initial public offering (IPO), selling over four million shares of stock at $22 per share, and creating about 300 millionaires—executives and other employees of Apple (https://www.edn.com/apple-ipo-makes-instant-millionaires-december-12-1980/). Apple had been founded just four years earlier by Steve Jobs, Steve Wosniak, and Ronald Wayne, though Wayne sold his 10% share for $800 shortly after the founding.

The other thing that happened was that US copyright law was amended to include computer programs. Copyright “a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright).

Supporters of copyright law contend that without copyright, people would be less likely to create works, including software programs, because they would not be able to make any money from those works. I think that that is arguable—Shakespeare did not have the benefit of copyright laws, and yet he wrote something like 37 plays. Of course, people did steal his work, but usually not very successfully. And, at the same time, Shakespeare stole plot ideas from other people. But it is possible that, without copyright protection, some of the software programs we rely on today would never have been written, and without the software programs, the hardware would not be nearly as useful to us as it is.

There are some things I remember from the early days of computing. My first computer was a Kaypro II, the first “portable” computer, though it was much bigger and heavier than a laptop is today. It was a CPM machine with dual floppy disk drives—the 5.25” floppy drives, not the 3.5” harder drives. I bought in 1982, and along with a Brother HR13 printer, I paid $2400 (that’s almost $7,200 today). A few years later, the internet became widely available through America Online, but it was more about games than anything else.

In 1994, Yahoo came along, and then in 1996, it was Google. They offered searchable databases to anybody who was able to log on to the internet, and pretty soon, everybody was logging on. Then, of course, came laptops and smart phones, and now the internet is pretty much in your pocket.

I love the internet because one of my character flaws is that I am incredibly curious (maybe that is obvious from this blog).  I love to find things out. If I come across a new word, I want to look it, and not just its definition but its etymology as well. When I see something I did not know about on the On This Day webpage, I often want to look into it further.

When I was in college and grad school, looking things up took a lot more time and effort. It meant going to the library, looking through books or articles or encyclopedias. In grad school, the library wasn’t just a walk across campus as it was in college. I had to drive to campus and find a parking spot.

One of the things that kind of frustrates me in my own students is that they do not seem to be curious—they don’t share my character flaw. And yet looking up a word or an event is so easy for them. I do not understand why they don’t use the smart phone and the internet to satisfy my curiosity. I hate to think that they are indolent.

The image today is from the Chookfest website, and the link includes some of the specs of a Kaypro II (http://www.chookfest.net/computers/kaypro-ii.html).