What's Been and What's Ben

Technology seems to have not changed during my life. It reflects a more gradual nature of time that occurs when you actually live it. I see it like arrive at a mountain to wondering why it doesn’t seem to move while you are standing before it. Shortening from the geological to human time scale gives some credence to the lack of progress. For most of the beginning of the 20th century technology seemed to have moved at a rapid rate of horse and buggy to space shuttle and solar cell. Everything appears to simply improve on existing devices. Perhaps I am overestimating the ability to have a fully new idea while ignoring all the work done previously to create ideas.

I blame the baby boom. A generational bubble got old and got boring. New technologies were sidelined. American history since WWII has been defined by a bunch of people going through the same phases of life simultaneously. The imagination died. It will be up to my Internet-savvy, post 9/11, increasingly egalitarian, and overwhelmingly pro-Obama generation to save the day.

My reference frame was tilted when my teacher asked what computer processors and operating systems we first used. The majority of the class answered Pentium 2 or 3 or 4 and most said windows XP. I remember when windows had a program manager and no start button. I remember a brand new computer that did not have a Pentium processor. When hard disk space was a few MB – not a few TB, an increase by a factor of 1,000,000 in my lifetime. I forget that I did get to experience the whole life of the modern Internet. When google and youtube came around.  The world is united in a massive network that will start featuring alphabets other than just English. ICANN announced they will allow registration of web addresses in foreign languages. They also plan to open up top-level domains for naming. So no “.com”, instead we will in coming years be able to go to “search.google”, although I think they will keep the “http://” which the creator of deeply wishes he had saved billions of man hours and only used one “/” instead of two.

The alarm clock had to have been an incredible invention. I think. What did people do before them? Would you just need to form the habit of waking up at a certain time. Was it more acceptable to be late? I can see the increase in turn-by-turn directions guided by GPS technology as a parallel idea. In a decade, with GPS in even the cheapest phones, would it be just as lame to say that you couldn’t find the place as it is to say now that you slept in?

People thought this a century ago. People thought that because they had good parchment paper, trains, textile mills, and Newton’s gravity that everything was done. Physicists were wrapping things up now that everything was solved. All experiments at the time followed theory flawlessly. Scientists never ask questions that they don’t know the answer to already. It seems that pure science research is ignored for not being profitable enough – no industry partner. Nuclear research only developed because of bomb-making potentials. Laser research is now receiving ridiculous money for weapons systems. If only there was a military application for peace.