Hard to imagine

While walking yesterday, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in years. It was a half-gallon milk bottle from the 1950s sitting on a sill just inside the barn. The glass bottle was the kind that used a cardboard stopper the size of a half-dollar as a lid.

Our milkman delivered Barber’s milk to our house once a week in a yellow refrigerated panel truck. You could follow his progress through our rural community by the sound of barking dogs. Times have changed.

The first science fiction programs gave a hint of what was to come. I watched shows on a black and white television that hummed when I turned it on. Sometimes the TV had to be smacked smartly on the side to stop it from scrolling. The smacking didn’t stop the picture from flipping, but it made me feel better.

But while watching those early shows on Saturday morning, I did not dream the far-fetched science fiction would come about in my lifetime.

Once computers came to the masses, things began to accelerate; slowly at first, but this day and time it seems like you need to fasten your seatbelt just to check your email or morning headlines.

You could call me an early adopter. I worked third shift with MaBell back in the 1980s. The job title was Computer Attendant, but what that meant was I loaded digital tapes as big as a medium-sized pizza onto machines that were larger than most refrigerators. These tapes were for storing and retrieving data for the mainframe computer. My work kept me busy early in the shift doing system backups, but later on, it was a struggle to keep my eyes open during the wee morning hours.

One night I noticed a new IBM personal computer in the corner of the data center. The manager had purchased the PC to do spreadsheets and type letters. No one used the contraption at that hour, so I was free to learn about it.

Sitting down tentatively, I watched a tiny square slowly blinking on the corner of the green phosphor monitor. My journey began.

That computer had 28k of memory and two floppy disk drives. The watch on my arm today is more powerful than that old PC, but that computer was state of the art back then. Creating those first few documents was all it took to hook me. I realized that typewriters would soon follow the dinosaurs. The impact that would send them to extinction wasn’t a giant meteor but a tiny green blinking cursor on a monitor.

Some time later, I watched my friend Ken Owens, who also worked at the phone company, log on to Prodigy.com via a modem and telephone wire connected into the back of a PC. The modem screeched as it connected to Prodigy which was one of the first internet providers. Looking over his shoulder as he searched the internet, I watched text and pictures slowly appear. The screen looked like a colorized Etch-a-Sketch as it loaded.

In those first few moments, I realized how small the earth was, and I knew this new technology would be tremendous.

These days with smartphones, Facebook, and online banking, it’s hard to think of what life was like before them.

When I look at my young great nephew Jordan, technology is easy for him. He understands how complicated software and games work.

He can use our remote control without saying bad words. And when I think of the state of technology when I was his age and how far it’s come in my lifetime, I wonder where it will be when he reaches 65?

What will be his typewriter or glass milk jug? It’s hard to imagine.

Trying to imagine the future.