When is it that you start to feel old? I'm starting to think it is when your kids marvel at technologies they've never seen ... but that were once part of your daily world.
This week, I've been Out & About a on the big business of birthdays. Tenth birthdays, specifically. And along the way, I've been reminded what it is like to see things through a ten year old's eyes - what it is like to finally be 'big' and with two-digits in your age, and being very observant of all the technologies in the world around you.
Some of these technologies are ho-hum. Broadband, for example, is nothing special to a 10-year old. Its occasional absence is considered odd and quaint, on the same level as having to light candles or cook by firelight. Cutting edge? Nope. Just life as usual.
All varieties of computers are equally commonplace. Nothing mysterious about them and if you don't know how to do something with it, you just click a mouse around, check out menus and figure it out. A big deal? Nope.
Cell phones and various cell phone features including voice recording, photos, and mini-movies are blasé too. Sure, everyone wants a cell phone, but there is absolutely nothing unique about them.
But there are some objects that inspire awe, fascination, and deep curiosity. We found one of these the other week. It was in an office, in the corner.
It was a magical device that put letters and symbols on paper, without going to a printer. There were no files to create, no devices to hook up, nothing to wait for. My now-10 year old had never seen this marvel before and was quite taken by it.
What was this amazing breakthrough, you ask?
We artifacts of the pre-digital age call it a typewriter.
Honest, the humble typewriter was deemed to be highly fascinating and worthy of much exploration.
Then there was the novel user interface that was discovered a short time ago. That day, we were traveling by car. By cool classic 60s Mustang to be more specific. It was a friend's car and the lovely Miss Allegra wanted to open the window - but was stumped. How does this window work? Thus, the concept of the crank down window entered our world - and it too was a marvelous invention, worthy of awe. That same car featured another popular technology - it was called a vent window, and it was totally operated by hand.
The things we use every day quickly lose their patina of awe. The world moves fast, but our absorption and normalization of change move almost as fast. How quickly we forget the gifts of technology and what it brings, and grumble when it doesn't work.
I keep odds and ends as reminders of where we have been. In various boxes hither and yon are a waxer (once used for attaching typeset copy to a pasteup board), a 300 baud modem, a Mac SE30, several bottles of whiteout, a metal type slug set on a linotype machine, a California job case, a very early simple solar powered calculator, a slide rule, a reel-to-reel magnetic tape, some old 78 rpm recordings ... and heaven only knows what else.
When I set aside my daily jaded persona, I can almost remember how awesome the waxer was when it replaced rubber cement and how a CRT screen with a preview removed the frustration of setting type on a blind keyboard with 8-bit paper tape. I can almost remember the moment I was blown away with the speed of that SE30 and the graphics it could render in a game called Shufflepuck Café. And for a moment I actually became that 10 year old and heard an absent father's voice playing off mysterious magnetic substrate on the reel-to-reel tape.
We've always had wonders around us! Who knew?
There is nothing wrong - and in fact there are many things right - in absorbing technology into our lives without a second thought. But every now and again, it is healthy to see our history in a new light and to be reminded that maybe it is true that everything old is new again.
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