October 21st, 2024
Telephones
This is the kind of telephone I used when I was young:
If you don’t know how to operate it, don’t worry. That was then, this is now. We had just one telephone for the whole family. Back then, telephones were for short conversations only. You didn’t spend time gossiping on the telephone, because you never knew if someone else might call, and there was no way to know if that happened. If you were waiting for an important call, and your brother was using the phone, you’d stand over him, glaring and pointing to your watch.
Later on, when I was in college, I lived in a farmworkers’ cabin. It had a telephone, but it was on a party line, meaning that we shared the phone line with six other families. So I did not use the phone unless absolutely necessary.
Phone calls in the local area were free of charge, but anything outside of your local area was considered to be “long distance” and “long distance” meant “big bucks”. The charges for long distance calls could easily reach $5 — equivalent to nearly $40 today! And you didn’t even think of making an international call — you had to go through an operator to do that.
This is the telephone I use now:
I use it for a lot more than just telephone calls. I make video calls, too. I talk to people all over the planet, and it costs me nothing extra, no matter how long I talk. It’s a photo camera, too, and a movie camera, a highly detailed world map, a clock, a stopwatch, a timer, a flashlight, a store for buying music and software, a voice recorder, an address book, a notebook, a small library of books, a device for recording health statistics, a measuring tool, a compass, a bubble level, a calculator, a tool for doing my banking, and a bunch of other things. I’ve come a long, long ways since the days of that dial phone!
Cars
This is the first car I ever drove: a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle:
It was our wedding gift from our parents; it cost us $300 when we bought it in 1972 — equivalent to $2,259 today in 2024. We were starving students back then, so I had to do all the maintenance work myself. I bought a copy of the now-mythical “Idiot Book” and taught myself everything about that car. I did all the maintenance and even tore down the engine to make repairs.
This is the car I drive today:
It’s a 2022 Tesla Model 3. It cost considerably more than our VW Beetle, but it is immensely superior. This car is difficult to describe because it has so many features. I’ll pick out a few of the more interesting features to give you a taste of this remarkable vehicle.
When you open the car door, the window automatically lowers an inch. This makes closing the door easier; you don’t have to fight the air pressure to close the door. As soon as you close the door, it closes the window.
The car can be controlled through its screen interface, but your smartphone can play a bigger role. You can use your smartphone to tell the car that you’ll be leaving in an hour, and it will begin conditioning the battery for optimal performance. If you’re driving a long distance, it wants to know where you intend to recharge so that it can condition the battery for ideal performance.
It is especially wary changing lanes. It has a camera on each side of the car, and if you signal that you’re going to change lanes, it displays the video from the camera on that side, and slightly to the rear — right where your blind spot is. This should protect you from inadvertently crashing into a car while changing lanes. Even better, it will take control away from you and prevent you from changing lanes if it can see that doing so would cause an accident.
It also warns you of a variety of potentially dangerous situations, such as when you drift too close to the side of the road. It even beeps quietly when the traffic light you’re waiting at turns green.
I could go on and on about how smart this car is. One other thing: it needs no maintenance and no repairs. It has only a few moving parts, so there isn’t much that can go wrong. My wife drove on a pebbly road and got a small pebble wedged in the disk brake; that required a repair person to come to remove the pebble. That’s about it for service.
Most of our driving is local, so we recharge our Tesla at home, which is a lot cheaper than buying gasoline. And it takes all of about 5 seconds to plug it in; no waiting at gas stations.
I’ve come a long ways since the days of my VW Beetle. However, one thing hasn’t changed: the Tesla is also white.
Calculating
This is what I used to calculate when I was an undergraduate:
It’s called a “slide rule” and it was the standard device for calculating back then. I won’t attempt to explain how it worked; let’s just say it was marvelous. You could multiply and divide; get square roots, sines, cosines, the circumference of circles, logs, and a bunch of other things. There were really big, powerful slide rules that could handle almost any calculation. I spent much of my savings on a really great one and then, six months later, it got caught in the wheel of my motorcycle and shattered. Dirty ricklefricks!
No, there were no calculators back then. You just had to be good with numbers.
This is what I calculate with now:
It’s better than a slide rule.
If you are a reasonable person, you are probably asking “So what?” That’s a good question. Here’s the answer:
You’re next!
I experienced huge, dramatic changes in technology in my life, but you will experience even faster change. The pace of change has been steadily increasing. When the personal computer revolution began, there were only a few tens of thousands of us working on these tiny machines; now there are tens of millions of people working on improving them. Nowadays we have fewer factory workers and more scientists and engineers. During the 20th century, technology attracted some billions of dollars of investment every year; nowadays, we’re seeing trillions of dollars of investment money every year.
The march of obsolescence
Every mighty leap of technological progress obsoletes some older technology. Odds are I have more obsolete, useless technological knowledge in my head than you have shiny new technological knowledge in your head. After all, I have been messing around with technology for 50 years; you haven’t had that much time. I still know a little about vacuum tubes. I knew the 6502 processor inside and out; back then, I could read 6502 machine code.
I completely mastered the Atari 800 computer system. I knew everything there was to know about how it worked. I even knew some things that were not published anywhere, but were part of insider lore. But computers were simpler then; I doubt that anybody knows everything there is to know about the Macintosh, or Windows, or even Linux — they’re all too big for one person to figure out. Is there anybody who knows everything there is to know about building impressive web pages? The fact that hackers are still able to break into protected computer systems demonstrates the fact that nobody completely understands such systems. Right now the human brain is the most complex phenomenon we know of; how long do you think it will be before the Internet, with its tens of billions of servers, becomes the most complex phenomenon we know of?
The only way to cope with this mushrooming complexity is to specialize: focus on one particular technology to master. The problem you will face is that, as technology grows larger, your specialty must grow smaller relative to the overall technology. If you pursue webpage creation, your specialty will narrow to tinier and tinier portions of the overall creation, even as you spend more and more time trying to keep up with your chosen technology.
The moral of this story: You’re going to have to change faster and faster.