I sit here with my
morning coffee thinking about my Kindle e-book reader and (paper) books. It
occurs to me I am living through another change caused by new technology. Being
born in 1942, I have seen several such
changes. I have purchased several e-books on-line from Amazon and borrowed
e-books on-line from my library. In the Internet age distance means nothing but I still wonder at
receiving books from an Indiana library while sitting here in Florida. Once
selected from the on-line site the books usually appear on my Kindle in less
than 60 seconds. Wow!
The e-books cannot be
put on your shelf for future use...but they will exist in your e-book memory
and the “cloud “ storage maintained for you by Amazon. My early model Kindle does
not handle pictures and drawings well…but the e-print is expandable and easier
to read than paper print. Graphics can be beautiful on PCs or an IPAD if you
use them as your e-reader. E-readers with full color graphics are already here
but the publishing industry is still working on a e-book business model that
can survive.
Looking back to my
youth I remember our home before TV. My parents used radio like we use TV
today. The programming was the same type as today…drama, music, news, etc. but
the pictures were in your imagination. When I was about eight (1950) we got our
first black and white TV. I think color TV came to our house about 10 years
later. Vacumn tubes powered our TVs. Stores had tube testers that you could use to find out which tube should be relaced. The transistor was a nerdy thing unknown to the public at the time that
was to change the world.
The first transistor
was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley
(seated at Brattain's laboratory bench), John Bardeen (left) and Walter
Brattain (right). This was perhaps the most important electronics event of the
20th century
.
My first hands-on contact
with computers was in the Navy. I was one of the first group of Data System Tech ratings in the Navy. Our
computer was a refrigerator sized box. It was made up of circuit boards with
individual transistors in pencil eraser size cans with three legs (wires). The memory was a 32Kbit
magnetic core type that was unreliable. We used front panel buttons laid out in
binary and octal (based 8 number system) format to control the computer. My
cheap digital wrist watch today has more power.
At IU (1960-61) a class
I had covered FORTRAN, one of the early programming languages. We wrote some
simple programs which were then put on punch cards. We took the cards over to
the temple (the climate controlled computing center) where priests (operators)
would feed out cards into the machine and the Gods (big main frame computers)
would print out our fate (error! Invalid command!).
Fall registration at IU
was a nightmare for some, especially Freshmen. Students gathered in the big
gymnasium on 7th street with class schedules in hand. No computers
were used until after registration to sort the punch cards. Each department had tables set up and you lined up to wait your turn
at the table. Then you find that the class (e.g. English 101 at 9:30 MWF) is full so you have go back to other tables to
change class times you already have in order to get the required classes at
non-conflicting times. This led to un-workable situations for some kids as the
classes filled up. The university figured on a 50% drop-out rate so they never
had enough freshman classes. I saw kids sitting on the gym floor crying in
frustration.
My first PC at work (1970)
used the Microsoft DOS operating system. MS-DOS is how Bill Gates began the road to become the
wealthiest man in the world. This was command-line input…type in an instruction
on the black and white monitor, hit return and see what happens. We also wrote
programs in FORTRAN or BASIC to control test machines and analyze data.
Of course there has
been progress in many fields since 1942 that have changed our lives in many
ways. The engineers that figured out how to build a cell phone system went
unnoticed by the public but the impact of it is now obvious to everyone. There
was no new fundamental science breakthrough but existing technologies were put
together in new way. So there is always stuff in the works below the public’s
radar that may get our attention in a big way someday. Bill Gates talked about
this and said advances do not happen overnight but on a scale of five or ten
years big things can happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment