Touch Technology in my Lifetime

I have yet another birthday coming at me, reminding me again that life is for a limited time only. It makes me reflective on how much has happened so far during my tenure on Earth. It some was amplified when I meandered in a 'junktique' shop in Bolton, NY on the shores of Lake George.

I stumbled across this Royal manual typewriter, a dead ringer for the one that was on my desk, when I started as a cub reporter at the Fall River Herald News in 1964. I was proud that I was entrusted to use such a complex and productive machine. I'd wipe it clean with a cloth about once weekly.

Next, I stumbled onto this gem, an SCM electric "portable," weighing about 40 pounds. It is identical to one I received as a gift in 1971. That white strip you see was the state of the art: a correction tape that replaced messy White Out, which came in a nail polish sized bottle and you used it to paint over typos. The electric nearly doubled my typing speed and I marveled that technology had come so far. I had no thought that technology would ever have to go beyond the SCM.

I have wanted to be a writer almost all my life, and I can measure out my decades by the keypads I have used.  Sometime, around my 13th birthday, I used lawn watering wages to buy this Underwood 05, which I think is from the 1930s. The fact that I still have it, gives testimony to how much I value it.

I did school reports on the old Underwood.  I made copies with carbon paper.MKy total audience was usually one or two people. My Royal let me produce words that were read by some small percentage of the residents of Fall River, Mass.

Now I have this 3.5 pound Lenovo Typepad X60, whose extended battery last five hours if I stay away from video. My words reach people all over the world.  The same machine lets me see and read what they have to say and lets me engage in conversations with people of diverse cultures. The devices have become so much smaller and there capabilities have gone so much further than I could have ever imagined.

You are probably younger than I am.  Just think of how the technology will emerge and improve in your lifetime.

Comments

[Michael Clarke]

Great post! I look at my little son and think the same thing everyday.

For me, I measure it out in memory more than anything else. I remember Spectrum and it's 16 kilobytes. Or how blown away I was in 1985 by an IBM desktop with a HARD DISC with TWENTY MEGEBYTES! Do you know how gigantic a megabyte is? Now my phone runs a flash memory chip the size of my thumbnail with literally a thousand times as much capacity. Dizzying.