Technology

Have you ever stopped and thought about what an incredible time we live in? It really is amazing how quickly technology is advancing.

About eight or nine years ago, Zach and I went up to Virginia to visit my parents. During the trip, Zach and I joined my Dad on a trip into Washington DC to do the museums. At the Museum of American History, we went through an exhibit that showed the history of the computer. As we walked through the exhibit, we saw room-sized pieces of the first modern electronic computer, called Eniac. In the next room, they had some huge IBM mainframe computers from the 1960's (they were bigger than a car!)

I remember my Dad commenting that when he started working for the Naval Research & Development center (he retired after 40 years there), those were the computers he remembers using. I was pretty amazed...some of the older PCs looked familiar to me, but the stuff my Dad remembered seemed ancient: big, clunky, awkward machines with vacuum tubes and wires going everywhere...

It occurred to me then, and again today at work, how quickly technology is changing before our eyes. I'm only 41 years old (only?), but its still pretty cool to think about how much things have changed since I was a kid.

Here are some examples you may be able to relate to, if you are 40 or older. (You 25-and-unders, just sympathize with me here...):

• Telephones: When I was a kid, our house had two wall-mounted rotary-dial phones. It used to take forever to dial a simple 7-digit number! Those were eventually replaced with wall-mounted pushbutton phones (with the same curly cords), and then by wireless phones. Those first "cordless" phones were HUGE by today's standards...if you're ever watching Seinfeld, look for the cordless phone he uses, it looks "ginormous"! Of course, today the tiny cell phone has taken over, and phones are now associated with people, not with locations. In the olden days, we would call and ask "Who is this?" Now we call and ask, "Where are you?"
  
  
• Music: I got into music when I was about 12, and joined the Columbia Record Club. I'll never forget the day my 7 "free" 12" vinyl LP records arrived...woo hoo! (No, I never did 8-track tapes.) I had amassed a pretty large record collection when everything started changing to cassette tapes. Cassettes were cool - you could play them in your car or on a portable "boom box"! I re-recorded most of my records onto cassettes, and then CD's came out. Aaargh! They were a big improvement: no more records skipping, no more cassette "hiss" noise. But I pretty much had to re-buy all my albums, but on CD. Now, of course, music has gone digital. If we buy a CD, we rip it onto our iPods immediately, but more often than not we download straight from iTunes... My 80GB iPod contains every song on every CD I ever bought, and still is only about 1/3 full! Absolutely amazing progression in about 25 years.
  
  
• Writing: I learned to type on my mother's 1950's vintage Royal typewriter. This thing had a black cast-iron frame, shiny round black keys that were really hard to push down, and a carriage return lever that would go "ding!" when you "hit return". You really had to peck the keys, or your letters would turn out faint grey (and you'd get a bad grade!) In the 1980's, Mom bought a IBM Selectric II typewriter. This thing was touch-sensitive: just barely touch the key, and the typewriter would do the hard work of typing the letter on the paper. And it had a "correction" button that would print a white patch over the last letter you typed, so you could type the correct letter over the top of that! This was all replaced by word processor programs on the personal computer, of course. Volkswriter, Word Perfect, then Microsoft Word. I still recall trying to explain to my Mom that the words I was typing were "in the computer", and that I wouldn't PRINT them until I had everything fixed just right "in the computer". She was used to composing her thoughts directly to paper...it was a real mind-blowing change for her. And of course now, we don't even need to create a "document" at all - we publish directly to the internet, like with this blog. Awesome.
  
  
• Computers: Probably the biggest progress has been made with the personal computer (PC). I can say that in my lifetime, I have personally experienced the birth of the PC! In high-school (1980-84), we used Atari 800 computers, which had amazing graphics for back in the day. This was about the time the first IBM PC came out, the first computer to really "take off" on a big scale. I went off to Virginia Tech as a freshman engineering student in 1984, with my new IBM "PC portable". This "portable" was really heavy, and about the size of a suitcase, so we nicknamed it the "luggable". It had two 5.25" floppy disk drives, a monochrome screen, and no hard drive (!). All your programs were on floppies, and all the documents you created were on floppies. (For you Mac types, my roomate had an original Apple Macintosh...we played a lot of this which was considered an awesome game in 1986.) I started at Michelin in 1988, and witnessed a lot of technology advances: hard drives (mid 80s), Microsoft Windows 3.1 (1990, first time we used a mouse!), first laptops (early 1990s). In 1993, Cathy and I signed up with America Online, which we would connect to with a 28kbps modem (SLOW!!!). AOL at the time was sort of like the internet, but not all self-contained. We eventually got a 56k modem, bagged AOL for Concentric(an ISP), and connected to the internet for the first time (late 90's). It was cool, but still slow. Today, we take wireless broadband internet for granted, but sometimes I forget how incredible it is compared to before! I'm sitting comfortably on my couch, with a wireless laptop, publishing to the internet, where this post will be available for anyone in the world to read. Wow!
  

Just as I was amazed at the wide range of technological improvements my Dad had seen in his lifetime, it occurred to me that I will likely see much more progress than he ever did. And you young folks will live (God willing) to see even more change than I ever will.

Will all these changes make our world a better place? More convenient, yes, more comfortable, yes, but probably not "better". Human nature has not changed -- we are still sinners living in a fallen world. Each of us still must choose whether we will do good or evil, but whatever we choose, technology is enabling us to do more of it, faster, and more easily than ever before.

Well, my brain hurts from just thinking about it, so I'm off to the refrigerator for a little non-technological time.

Thank goodness ice-cream sandwiches are still the same!