30 years of technology
By Linda Forrest
I’ll be turning 30 years old later this week and it has me reflecting on the technological advancements that have been made in the last three decades. It sure seems like we’ve come a long way, just in my lifetime.
I don’t remember a time before computers. We had a TRS80 from about the time I was born and cassette tapes containing the data were strewn throughout the den. Apparently we were ahead of the technology curve at my house. Dad had a Zenith laptop in the 1980s. It weighed a tonne and I’m pretty sure it had a whopping 640K of RAM.
I vaguely remember renting a VCR when I was a kid. Later, we got our own VCR – a top loader with a “remote control” that was actually attached to the VCR making it less “remote” than the name suggests. Entertainment mediums changed from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs to MiniDiscs to MP3s; from VHS or Beta to LaserDiscs to DVDs to Blue-Ray or HD-DVDs.
You could cook things really fast in this new fangled device called a microwave. It seems to work well for heating things up but doesn’t cook as well as a stove.
Some of my friends had the Atari or ColecoVision to meet their videogaming needs, but I got a Nintendo Entertainment System from Consumers Distributing in 1986. Hours and hours of fun.
Phones went from rotary dial to push button, from pulse to tone, from fixed to portable and to cellular and beyond.
It’s easy to feel nostalgic for one’s youth and I fall prey to that as well – remembering summers spent outside, reading on the swing set, biking to a friend’s house, summer camp where roasting marshmallows was the most technically advanced activity, snowmen made, forts erected and toppled… Despite all of the technological advancements taking place while I was growing up, it really felt that technology was a minor part of my daily existence.
Now, as I sit in front of a computer all day, talking on the telephone, emailing, reading online, technology is a huge part of my life. With younger people, technology is even more pervasive in their lives and advancements continue to be made every single day. One can only ponder where will we be 30 years from now. I’m willing to bet Alvin Toffler has some ideas…
