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  

VISIBLE EVOLUTION

Here in Maine we have had torrential rain for the last two days.   Yesterday I drove into town and on the way I saw a young woman walking in the downpour, holding an umbrella while focusing on her cell phone held a foot from her face.   I could not help but wonder what world her mind was in. 

In 1970 Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock pose the proposition that man could not adapt to rapid change; that like evolution, social and environmental changes must occur slowly in order for humans to adapt.   This is now easily disproved.

The most massive changes in human history has occurred over the last forty years and man not only adapted, but led the demand.

During the 1980’s basic personal computers became available.  These computers were able to run simple word processing programs and games.   Since that time, we have the internet, a truly world wide web, extremely powerful personal computers, cell phones, social media, GPS and now driverless cars.    Changes have come so fast that often a product is outmoded before it’s released.   People will wait in lines all night to buy the newest iPhone. 

This technology has brought about a rapid cultural change.  People have become less personally interactive as they live vicarious lives on social media.   A recent study claimed that people between the age of 16 and 35 will interact with their cell phones an average of 150 times a day: e-mails, social media, blogs, text messages, phone calls, games, photos, special aps – the cell phone now tends to regulate our life.

This constant obsession of being plugged into technology has got to be rewiring our brain and, perhaps in a dystopian fashion, leaving us vulnerable to programming by those that would control us. 

the Ol'Buzzard

FUTURE SHOCK

Alvin Toffler back in 1970 wrote the book Future Shock claiming that human beings were not genetically capable of processing changes at a rapid pace.   He claimed that changes must come slow for humans to be able to adapt, and therefore the future would not greatly differ from the past in any one lifetime.

This seemed to make sense at the time because it had taken decades for a transition from radio to television, and from black and white television to color television; 

from telephone operators to dial phones…

And then along came computers and disproved his entire premise.

In 1960 I was introduced to computers in the Navy and they were analog – wheels, diodes and punch cards

In 1964 the Navy bought aviation navigators in VP-26 anti-submarine squadron hand held calculators for $300.   They were about the size of a small book and could add, subtract, multiply and divide.  

Prior to that navigators and technicians used slide rulers.

In 1985 I was introduced to the Apple-2e computer.  It ran 48k of memory and could read six-inch floppy disk.  

 In 1988 I bought an apple 2c with a smoking 500k memory that could read three-inch hard disk.  For $550

In 1995 I bought a Dell computer with 250 megabytes of memory for almost a thousand dollars. 

I just bought my wife an HP laptop with one trilobite of memory for $350.  

Since 1985 we have gone to computer regulated cars, cell phones with more power and more features every year, the internet, GPS, driverless cars, DNA, cloning, satellite television, portable computers that can talk with you, intergalactic space probes and a technology that seems to be advancing in gargantuan steps almost monthly. 

Where in 1947 we were talking about the Bell-X-1 rocket ship breaking the sound barrier, 

today we have space probes traveling to other universes.  

Some of us older people do have trouble keeping up; but to young people this is conventional. 

I have seen more changes in my lifetime than people in a hundred generations prior to me experienced. 

We tend to forget this is an amazing time.

the Ol’Buzzard