The Awesomeness of Technology

[mscriv]

OK Net, let's not push this to PRSI. The point is how advancement can sometimes amaze you when you think back at how things were before.

Here's another example that hits me from time to time. I'll be driving along and I'll stop and think. Holy Cow! someone at some time was building this road foot by foot. I mean there was a time when this wasn't here and they decided to build it. Then you think about how long it takes to build a road and it's just amazing. I mean seriously, the interstate system is nuts when you think about the time and effort involved in it's construction and how it has changed our lives.

 

[yg17]

There are times when and where science needs a leash since, without moral judgment, science can be dangerous! Human cloning, stem cell generation, and nuclear weapon development, not to mention the whole field of chemical/biological weapon generation; all threaten mankind's existence. Indeed, science needs to be held back, at times, due to its rush to proceed without moral and/or ethical reasoning. So too, pure science, without moral education as a balance, is destructive (for example, instructing evolution theory absent from creation theory in the classroom). Yes, at times we have to keep science on a leash...

Human cloning and stem cell research do not threaten mankind's existence. They only can help it if cures for diseases are found through such research.

 

[63dot]

I consider the iPhone to be just as much, if not more, of a leap forward as the iPod was.

You are probably right, for your generation (post X-ers), if you are indeed young as I think you are. For baby boomers (b. '46-'64) in the Bay Area, I have seen little infiltration among my friends with the iPhone. Far more Blackberrys and regular cell phones. Their kids, in their teens and 20s, though have this real love affair with iPhone.

I see a lot of fat boomers out there at fitness clubs, on mountain bikes, and on jogging trails losing their new found fat (comes with age) donning their iPods. There's far more of us (boomers) than you Y2K and Y3K (post-mils, teens, tweens) folk combined.

 

[Zombie Acorn]

There are times when and where science needs a leash since, without moral judgment, science can be dangerous! Human cloning, stem cell generation, and nuclear weapon development, not to mention the whole field of chemical/biological weapon generation; all threaten mankind's existence. Indeed, science needs to be held back, at times, due to its rush to proceed without moral and/or ethical reasoning. So too, pure science, without moral education as a balance, is destructive (for example, instructing evolution theory absent from creation theory in the classroom). Yes, at times we have to keep science on a leash...

stem cell gen and cloning should proceed forward.

 

[gilkisson]

I do indeed have the occasional "whoa" moment.

Our first phone, as a kid, had letters in the number. I think it was Enterprise-5something. It was a party line, 3 or 4 other houses shared our number.

TV was B&W. I was the remote. We had 3 channels, 4 if you counted the UHF band, but that never came in too clear.

AM Radio had tubes. In the pickup truck. Took a few minutes to warm up before it would play.

When I grew up and got into IT (Data Processing back then), I used punch cards. I can still read Hollerith by eye, and remember doing octal math by hand. (at least, I think I can read Hollerith... 11-zone, 12-zone, zero-zone, right?)...

I saved up to upgrade to a Zilog Z80 chip, and bought a tube of memory. 9 chips. I paid over $200 for my first hard disk, whopping 20 meg. It wasn't bootable.

First mainframe I worked on had 512 kilo-digits of Core memory. It took up a room larger than my first apartment.

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I reflected back on this the other night, driving at 80MPH or so, listening to Pandora or iPod, something on my iPhone. Wife was texting our daughter in another state, carrying on an instant conversation a few hundred miles away. The computer in her hand, an iPhone, literally has hundreds of times the memory capacity and is several orders of magnitude faster than my first mainframe.

All this technology at our fingertips, and we don't even think about it.

Yeah, I do go "whoa" sometimes. I say "whoa" again when I think of the toys my grandkids will get to play with. I'm jealous.

 

[snberk103]

Communication. I think that is the biggest fundamental change that technology has allowed. And I don't know that technology is making us need to communicate faster, but is allowing us to.

I'm going from dim memory here. A decade or so ago there was Brit TV show called, I think, The Secret Life of Machines. Great show. One of the segments was about the Fax machine, and how it worked. Made perfectly good sense, and I now know how the machines work. For all the good that will do me now.

The best part was the Fax machine was, iirc, invented way back in the late 1800's or so. I think it may have even came before the telephone, but the technology was based on transmitting over telegraph wires. At great expense a company was formed to send documents from Paris to Marseilles. Now business people could send documents in hours instead of the several days then common. Company flopped big time. Technology worked just fine... but there was no need for it. No body at the time needed same day delivery. They were content with the current delivery dates, and didn't see the Fax as an improvement.

Now, we start to wonder what's wrong if an email takes more than 10 minutes to cross the globe.

 

[Mousse]

Nope you are not the only one. I remember when cable TV came out, when TV stations signed off for the night by playing the national anthem, I remember when the VCR came out and the VHS/Betamax battle. I had lots of records, both 33s and 45s. I was born in 1966.

Good to see more geezers on MR. Remember when we had only 3 channels? State of the Union messages pretty much killed the evening for me. "The President is on! He's on every channel!!!"

Remote control was a godsend for little kids. No longer would they get kick by big brother and told to get up and change the channel. It's also great for channel surfers (almost every guy), since we don't want to see what's on. We want to see what else is on.

 

[instaxgirl]

I'm old enough to remember having to go to the bank, get some money, go to the record shop, buy the vinyl/cassette/CD and go back home to listen to it.

Haha, it's only been 4.5 years since I had to do that I did a double take last week at the bus stop last week though when a teenage guy dug around in a shopping bag and produced a new CD which he then shoved in a portable CD player. I was all, woaaah, old school

I'm young, born in 1986, so I grew up with it, so nothing really amazes me.

I was born at the start of 1989, but it still amazes me. I can remember when I was 5 being taken out into the school hallway in groups of 7 or 8 and being shown The School Computer. It was on a trolley so it could be taken round the classrooms. I don't remember ever seeing it again. I do remember the big fuss that was made several years later when the school announced that every classroom would have its own computer.

My iPhone's the most frequent source of my "woaah technology" moments. Especially when I find some new app that turns it into a completely different device. I look at it and feel like I'm living in the future

The internet really trips me out though. Instant communication from all around the world, and the amount of information. It's incredible.

 

[Hayduke60]

I was born in 1960. I remember going as a family to buy out first big screen tv. It was a black and white Zenith console tv with maybe a 15 inch screen. It had a drawer on the front that held all the tubes to make it go. I remember my first tape recorder. I stayed up one night with my tape recorder set up in front of the tv, taping the launch of Apollo 11. I still have the tape. My dad used a slide rule at work and I remember playing with that piece of technology whenever he brought it home. I remember his first calculator. It was a high dollar Texas Instruments job that took like 8 double A batteries. I used to make fun of the computer nerds, all three of them, in high school because they thought computers would one day be commonplace in everyones home.