I’m a rather old chook, and have seen some amazing changes in the world in the last (nearly) 50 years of my current incarnation. The advent of personal computers being not the least of them.
Today I had to purchase one of those little dinky USB hard-drive thingies to store some programs off’ve my home computer. This ‘thing’ measures app 1.5cm by about 4cm, and can hold up to several squillion bits of information. Fer’ fucks sake, this blob of plastic and alloy can hold and then convey STUFF… words, ideas, friggin’ music and pictures as well.
How the hell did this come to be? How can a little square no bigger than two postage stamps do all this amazing stuff? How did the world get so clever in so few years? How freakin’ amazing is everything now in the 21st Century!!
I am so glad to be alive in this day and age, because life and our lifestyles change almost every day, and there is no place for complacency any more.
Oh, can somebody please tell me where to plug this little hooziewhatzit in? Too many slots on the back of my computer, I’m amazed, awed, and completely fucked when it comes to modern technology.
Mobile phones. I keep the thing in my pocket and it can be used as : a phone, a camera, a video camera, a watch, an alarm clock, a calendar, an organizer, a notepad, a calculator, a music player, a game station, a flashlight (and I probably forgot something). I’m still baffled.
Yeah, well don’t get me started about how I can press a button on my television, and PICTURES and SOUND come out that transport me to other worlds! Sure, I know intellectually that it is all simple and mechanistic, but it’s still seems lke magic to me.
Hey, geez, going back even to the old vinyl records blows my mind. How can something like ‘sound’ be manifest into something like ‘substance’?
Seriously, I could never become blase about this stuff. It just blows me away how amazingly mysterious the world’s workings are.
USB sticks are the first time, other than when I first logged onto the Internet, that I’ve felt technology is obviously advancing. We’re living in the future™. I thought we’d all be using MiniDiscs by now but I was wrong.
Heck, I just bought one of the Western Digital Passport external hard drives. It measures about 6" x 3.5" by 3/4", weighs about half a pound, and holds 500 gigs!
One of my first posts on this board was to ask why Roger Daltrey stuttered in the song, “My Generation” and on the Smothers Brothers TV show sometime in the 1960s. It was answered by strangers I’ve never met, from various places in the world, within about 40 minutes. How amazing is that? There are computers just lying around my apartment, which can provide information on just about anything imaginable in astonishingly short times.
Then there’s the cell phone in general, smart phones in particular and GPS devices. At this point, I can pull out my smartphone, speak “sandwich 90266,” and about ten seconds later it’ll list out places near the 90266 zip code that sell sandwiches. And then it’ll give me turn-by-turn directions to get where I’m going. This is like something Captain Kirk would do! (Of course, he’d be on an alien planet and make out with the sexy ailen sandwich maker).
One thing I was lamenting last week is that there are entire generations of people right now who were not alive to see the moon landings. But they’ve seen just about everything else. We have seen comets hit the far side of Jupiter and Voyagers I and II are in interstellar space. We now have places in shopping malls where they zap your eyes with lasers, lift your cornea, change the shape of your eye, and zap it with lasers to make the lens hold that (better) shape. Holy crap!
And, sorry if we’re sick of this, but the US just inaugurated a president whose family, “is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry.” [NYTimes]. That’s a bit different.
I was a big fan of the Little House books when I was a kid and have retained the image of how things looked to Laura in her day. So sometimes I imagine if she were around today, how things would look to her. The things I would have to explain to her – airplanes, telephones. There’s a passage in the book when the teens gather for a party and it’s a big deal that they all join hands and let a little newly-discovered electricity literally pass through them. All the things electricity does now.
Mapquest and the like, and GPS are the ones that amaze most right now.
Yeah; that ticks me off. Plus, where are the robots that were supposed to do all the work for us? Damn robots.
Another thing that gives me pause: how many people are doing jobs and supporting their familes doing activites that didn’t exist 50 years ago? I’m very productive, but in the past 24 years, all I’ve really done is push bits of information around, sometimes causing laser toner to be arranged in informative ways. And doing this puts food on my table! Yet there’s nothing I’ve created in the physical world; all of it could fit on one thumb drive.
Old news; I’ve had a 16 GB microSDHC for several months now. I’ve put GPS maps for all of North America and about 80 CDs worth of music on it, and still have about 7 GB left for more goodies.
When I was a kid, that would require approximately 468 LP’s. To store 468 LP’s would require (guesstimating) a shelf about 6ft high by about 4ft wide. Playing one required pulling it out of its case, putting it on a specially-designed machine, and putting a needle on it. Forget about playing one in a car or playing it on any kind of portable device.
When I was in junior high school, they came out with CD’s. 468 CD’s would take about 1/8th (guesstimating) the space of the same amount of LP’s to store, even less if you didn’t keep the cases. They were the height of technology: they could be played in a car (and rarely skipped)! You could even listen to them while you were walking - all you needed was a portable CD player. The downside was that you could only carry one at a time, but so what?
Now that I’m an adult, I have a gizmo holds over 7,500 songs and is only slightly bigger than a deck of cards. I can carry it wherever I go, play it in my car, keep it on my person, whatever. To switch from one artist to another merely requires pressing a few buttons.
Funny, I do the same thing. But with her dad. And evolution.
I have this neat stick which, when I scratch it on paper, leaves marks. It works about 75% of the time, but when it doesn’t, I can easily reboot it by making little circular motions with it on the paper. And when it’s not in use, I can preserve the life of it by clicking a little button on the other end.
