I am currently 52 years old, having been born in 1957. Lately I've been thinking about how fast technology has advanced even in my relatively short lifetime. Right now, I own a broadband laptop, a cordless phone, an iPod Shuffle (1st generation, already obsolete!), a portable CD player, a DVR and a digital camera (an older one, admittedly, only 2 megapixels). My TV is on the older side, a small 9 inch color table top TV, but it does the job. I remember the days before color TV, when black and white was the norm. I remember the old TV shows like The Jackie Gleason Show and the Ed Sullivan Show, which were live shows in front of a studio audience, not pre-taped and run later on. I'm from the old 33 rpm phonograph generation that listened to music on old vinyl LP's. I remember well the introduction of touch tone phones, but we had the old fashioned rotary phone. It's so hard to believe how digitizing everything has revolutionized the way we do just about everything. Computers have come light years since I first learned to program in BASIC on an old Radio Shack TRS 80. I remember the first cell phones we used at work on our bookmobiles - and that wasn't so long ago, either. They were the size of a telephone headset and had LED display. Now, cell phones are small pocket sized computers that can do everything - and more - that this laptop that I am typing on can do. My land line phone is a cordless and I can walk around my entire apartment talking on it without worrying about the cord. If I don't feel like using my land line, I can take my cell phone out of my purse and talk on that. My cell phone has a limited mini-browser that at least lets me view news, weather and sports, and that's about it, but my phone has some fine organizational tools, like an address book, a notepad and a calendar. My cell phone is small and sleek and slides easily into my purse or pocket. I just recently upgraded to a newer computer that allows me to finally use an iPod Shuffle that I got for Christmas from my family a few years ago. It only holds 512MB of music, but that is a LOT of music! I've been able to upload about 6 CD's worth of music into it, enough to last an entire workday. The sound quality is astoundingly good. I can wear my iPod on a lanyard that comes with it and walk around all day at work listening to music. I could, if I chose to do so, also use it as a data storage device, but I don't need to do that, because I have several jump drives that can do that. I bought a 16G one to store most of the files from my old computer and my brother's girlfriend gave me a 2G one several years ago because my old 10G hard drive was getting quite full and I needed extra storage space. They gave us a 2G one at work to use to store our work files on as well, so...I have more than enough storage space on jump drives to store stuff on. It's amazing to me that once I take digital photos on my camera, that I can download them to my computer and store them on a jump drive to save space on my hard drive! I remember not so long ago despairing of having enough floppy disks on which to store my files and wondering how on earth you could store anything bigger than 1 or 2MB because that's about all those old floppy disks could hold. Now I can store music, photographs, documents and other important information on a tiny jump drive that can slip easily into a storage compartment in my purse or briefcase. I'm just amazed that it wasn't so long ago that none of this stuff was possible. It's only been in the past 10 or so years that technology has advanced so fast that we can have computers small enough to put in our pockets and take with us wherever we go that can do everything that multiple devices like what I have do. New call phones are part telephone, part computer, part .mp3 player, part radio and part digital camera, among other things. Just amazing. I keep wondering how much more advanced things will get with all of this new technology. It sure has changed my profession of working in a library. So many things have been digitized and there is so much more that needs to be digitized before it's lost to age. And newer librarians don't know the catalogue without punching their search into a computer whereas I learned it by osmosis, working with it every day and needing to know it at a moment's notice. It's no longer necessary to learn that stuff because you can punch it into a computer that will tell you where to find a book on the shelf. Ah, well, that's the way things have evolved. Technology, for the most part, is a wonderful thing, but it can have its down side as well. I'm just astonished at the speed with which technology has advanced in my lifetime, and I keep wondering where it's going to go from here.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The wonders of technology
I am currently 52 years old, having been born in 1957. Lately I've been thinking about how fast technology has advanced even in my relatively short lifetime. Right now, I own a broadband laptop, a cordless phone, an iPod Shuffle (1st generation, already obsolete!), a portable CD player, a DVR and a digital camera (an older one, admittedly, only 2 megapixels). My TV is on the older side, a small 9 inch color table top TV, but it does the job. I remember the days before color TV, when black and white was the norm. I remember the old TV shows like The Jackie Gleason Show and the Ed Sullivan Show, which were live shows in front of a studio audience, not pre-taped and run later on. I'm from the old 33 rpm phonograph generation that listened to music on old vinyl LP's. I remember well the introduction of touch tone phones, but we had the old fashioned rotary phone. It's so hard to believe how digitizing everything has revolutionized the way we do just about everything. Computers have come light years since I first learned to program in BASIC on an old Radio Shack TRS 80. I remember the first cell phones we used at work on our bookmobiles - and that wasn't so long ago, either. They were the size of a telephone headset and had LED display. Now, cell phones are small pocket sized computers that can do everything - and more - that this laptop that I am typing on can do. My land line phone is a cordless and I can walk around my entire apartment talking on it without worrying about the cord. If I don't feel like using my land line, I can take my cell phone out of my purse and talk on that. My cell phone has a limited mini-browser that at least lets me view news, weather and sports, and that's about it, but my phone has some fine organizational tools, like an address book, a notepad and a calendar. My cell phone is small and sleek and slides easily into my purse or pocket. I just recently upgraded to a newer computer that allows me to finally use an iPod Shuffle that I got for Christmas from my family a few years ago. It only holds 512MB of music, but that is a LOT of music! I've been able to upload about 6 CD's worth of music into it, enough to last an entire workday. The sound quality is astoundingly good. I can wear my iPod on a lanyard that comes with it and walk around all day at work listening to music. I could, if I chose to do so, also use it as a data storage device, but I don't need to do that, because I have several jump drives that can do that. I bought a 16G one to store most of the files from my old computer and my brother's girlfriend gave me a 2G one several years ago because my old 10G hard drive was getting quite full and I needed extra storage space. They gave us a 2G one at work to use to store our work files on as well, so...I have more than enough storage space on jump drives to store stuff on. It's amazing to me that once I take digital photos on my camera, that I can download them to my computer and store them on a jump drive to save space on my hard drive! I remember not so long ago despairing of having enough floppy disks on which to store my files and wondering how on earth you could store anything bigger than 1 or 2MB because that's about all those old floppy disks could hold. Now I can store music, photographs, documents and other important information on a tiny jump drive that can slip easily into a storage compartment in my purse or briefcase. I'm just amazed that it wasn't so long ago that none of this stuff was possible. It's only been in the past 10 or so years that technology has advanced so fast that we can have computers small enough to put in our pockets and take with us wherever we go that can do everything that multiple devices like what I have do. New call phones are part telephone, part computer, part .mp3 player, part radio and part digital camera, among other things. Just amazing. I keep wondering how much more advanced things will get with all of this new technology. It sure has changed my profession of working in a library. So many things have been digitized and there is so much more that needs to be digitized before it's lost to age. And newer librarians don't know the catalogue without punching their search into a computer whereas I learned it by osmosis, working with it every day and needing to know it at a moment's notice. It's no longer necessary to learn that stuff because you can punch it into a computer that will tell you where to find a book on the shelf. Ah, well, that's the way things have evolved. Technology, for the most part, is a wonderful thing, but it can have its down side as well. I'm just astonished at the speed with which technology has advanced in my lifetime, and I keep wondering where it's going to go from here.
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