Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

As I drove down the interstate this afternoon, I found myself thinking about how absolutely astonished I would have been if, at the age of 10 or 12, someone would have told me what was coming in the way of technology.
Take cars, for instance. When I was 10, we had a 1955 Ford. It was a freaking deathtrap by today’s standards: hard steel dashboard, no seatbelts, no airbags, drum brakes. It lacked power steering and power brakes and you actually had to crank the windows up and down. And, oh yeah, no air conditioning. The sound system consisted of an AM band radio and a single speaker in the dashboard that reflected its sound off of the inside of the windshield. Radial tires were decades away, so the handling and suspension were pretty much garbage.
Imagine my surprise if I had known that my future held a sleek 2-seat car with removable hard top, complete with power steering, power brakes, radial tires, AC, power windows, seatbelts, airbags and a four-speaker stereophonic sound system that played discs read by a concentrated beam of coherent light and got digital stereo radio signals from a pair of satellites more than 22,000 miles out in space. Absolutely unbelievable then, but utterly ordinary today.
Or what if someone had told me most people would have pocket telephones and that I would have one that electronically held hundreds of phone numbers, a powerful calculator, my appointment calendar and to-do list, a couple of games and the complete texts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and James Joyce’s Ulysses? And it gave me instant access to a worldwide computer network and the vast information repository it represented, not to mention the ability to send electronic mail instantly to anyone on the planet. Of course my pocket phone is a bit behind the times because the newer models have more storage capacity and include a color digital camera.
Can you imagine how amazing that would have been to a kid living in a small town where we were still making operator-assisted phone calls and paying long distance charges to phone someone in the nearest city of any consequence, only 20 miles away?
I suppose this shouldn’t really surprise me, considering that my father was born just seven years after the first transcontinental automobile journey and the Wright brothers’ first flight. Dad grew up on a farm without electricity and indoor plumbing where much of the field work was done with horses. That sounds like something out of a Third World country, but we’re only talking about a couple of generations ago right here in the United States.
One of the interesting consequences of being around nearly 60 (ack!!!) years is the perspective it gives you. My wife’s teenage kids have never known a time without home computers, cell phones, compact discs, ATMs, video games, fiber optics, lasers, microwave ovens, color TV, cable TV, pocket calculators, TV remote controls, FM radio, cordless phones and halogen lighting. These are all things that have come into being during my lifetime and I’ve only been around since 1945.
Assuming technological advances continue at the same rate – or at a constantly accelerating rate – the future world of my 5-month-old granddaughter will be every bit as inconceivable from a 2004 vantage point as today’s world was from 1910 or even from 1955.
How cool is that?