Like most people, the majority of the time I take all the tech around me for granted. But every now and then I give it some thought and think, “wow”.
The other day I had to leave work early and was going to finish the rest of my shift from home. I wanted to stay connected even during my drive home so I set up my phone as a Wifi hotspot and connected my laptop to my company’s VPN. Then on the drive home I have Pandora running on my phone as usual, and am using Bluetooth to play it through my car stereo.
That’s 3 separate full duplex transceivers running at the same time. In a device that fits in your hand. That’s smaller than a paperback book. That still has plenty of capacity left to surf the web, or read a book, or take pictures.
It just blows my mind sometimes. Then I go back to taking it for granted and yelling at it when an app locks up or it drops a call.
I work in tech, know how to set it up, how to troubleshoot complex problems and manage very large systems yet I still can’t believe it works at all. I am still skeptical about all these so called radio waves going around everywhere and somehow not conflicting with all the other trillions of other ones passing through almost everything including buildings or even outer space. Not buying it.
Even over the air TV makes no sense. People supposedly invented the first TV’s with nothing more than 1920’s technology and knowledge. They just decided just a couple of decades after phonographs became widespread that it would be a swell idea to send moving pictures through the air and have them reassemble themselves in real time from great distances. OK, yeah sure. Hell, my 1995 IBM computer could barely do that with a wired internet connection within Netscape but at least that made sense.
There is something more at work here. Now we just have to figure out what it is.
When I press “Post Quick Reply”, this message will be beamed from a small antenna to a satellite orbiting 22,000 miles above the surface of the Earth and re-transmitted to a dish somewhere on the surface of the Earth possibly hundreds of miles from my location.
How does a crappy lightbulb make things louder? Wait, what? It’s a copy of my sound but louder? So what it’s a precomputer sampler now?
Seriously, I am floored by what my phone does. At 49yoa I’m not ancient, but I remember cool electronics of yesteryear and every box had one job, unless they mounted a clock on it too then it also told time.
My TV, was a tv
My electronics Simon game, played Simon
My Coleco football game played football
Fridge - cold
Oven - hot+time ( gotta have that oven clock)
I did have one multifunctional electric device.
My guitar…
Made mom scream
Dad slam doors
Dog hide
Neighbors move
Property values went down
I’m completely stunned that radio transmission was invented. Marconi’s work sounds ludicrous. But everything after that seems like a logical follow-on.
Wait, so if I buy a long-ish sandwich in Britain do I go to the tube shop or the valve shop? Further, would it be Metric or Imperial? Pointless add-on; I just finished Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue and it is chock a block with all these incongruities between english versions.
Just got 20cm LIDAR data for our entire county from the state for free. I can make 3d views of anywhere in the county. Sure, it’s a little choppy, but pretty good. Can also make elevation profiles.
I’m JUST old enough to remember early modern-day internet, and I’m JUST young enough to grow up with technology to be comfortable with it, and it amazes me how much access we have to each other, which leads me to be even more amazed that people were able to date back in the day.
How did you go on trips without Google Maps? How can you show up at a restaurant at 7 and just hope the other person shows up, without texting first and saying “Hey I’m here” or, more importantly, “Shit there’s an accident on the highway, but I’m coming! Don’t freak out! Here’s a picture of it for proof.”
I’m being a bit facetious and I’m exaggerating a bit, but it must have been so freakin hard to date before technology.
It wasn’t really any harder to date then than it is now, just had a smaller pool of candidates that was easily accessed.
I’m amazed that we figured out that lightening and other, smaller, sparks were good for anything other than starting fires. It’s batteries that astound me, lightening literally in a bottle, well, container anyway.
I think you’re just joking about this. Surely you realize that a vinyl record is placed on a record player (sometimes called a phonograph, which is Latin for ‘picture of a telephone’). The record player spins the record and a needle mounted on the end of an arm is inserted into the groove at the outer edge of the record. The groove is one long spiral and as the record turns the needle moves along in the groove. The needle is connected to a little baton inside the record player that directs a tiny little orchestra what to play.
