HOW FAR WE HAVE COME

The first time I ever saw a TV was in the late 1940’s in Chicago.   It had a round screen about eight inches in diameter and the picture was so snowy you could barely make out details. 

 

The next time I saw a TV was in the early 1950.   My uncle and his wife had one of the first TV in our little Mississippi Delta town.  It had a 16-inch screen, black and white.   My uncle had bought a plastic film that adhered to the TV screen: the film was blue on the top, yellow in the middle and green on the bottom; which gave a vague allusion to a color picture.  They could receive two channels with their outside antenna, but the picture was grainy and often became unfocused. 

I am sure that young people today would not understand what I am talking about when I say that both radios and TV’s of that era operated with vacuum tubes.

I could never have dreamt of living in a time of current technology.   What will technology be like when the young people of today reach my age? 

It is mind blowing

the Ol’Buzzard  

TECHNOLOGY AND ME

I have a new cell phone.  It is a flip phone and it can access the internet, send and receive text messages, take and send pictures – and I don’t know how to do any of that.   

Basically, I don’t have a need for any of that.   I keep the phone for emergencies if I am traveling, and I will probably use it less than fifteen minutes this year to contact my wife if I have a question while I go shopping at the grocery store by myself.

I don’t feel the need to stay connected every minute - 24/7.   But that doesn’t mean the world shouldn’t.

Though I am not connected, I am not decrying the rest of the universe that obviously is.    I am a dinosaur and have chosen to let technology leave me behind.

The children of the millennials are growing up plugged in to iPads and computers instead of watching Sesame Street; technology is replacing toys.     This will cause a rewiring of the brain producing a techno-generation that will accept rapid change and think and respond differently than their grandparents.    These children are the new aliens on planet Earth. 

What used to take decades to research, produce and market is now done in months.   New products, new ideas, new parameters are being introduced daily. 

In 1985 there was no internet being used by the masses.   An Apple Mac computer could store one megabyte of data.

  

In the last forty years there has been more change in human innovation than the forty-thousand years preceding.    We have satellites giving us GPS with accurate to within a foot; space telescopes exploring the distance galaxies of the universe; computers capable of massive compilations within seconds; and exploration of the genome systems that in the very near future will cure most diseases and allow humans to drastically extend their life span.   Not to mention creating a new generation of children adapted to dealing with technologies and this rapid change.  

the Ol’Buzzard