On Technology

Tonight I am uploading photos onto Flickr and considering the evolution of personal computing technology.


In the early 90s, my DOS-running 286 was considered hot stuff. It had a 40 megabyte (yes, megabyte) hard drive which was considered huge. As in "oh, you'll NEVER fill that up" huge. This was, of course, before digital media got started.

Tonight I am uploading approximately 500 photos from the last trip to London. My HUGE hard drive of the early 90s would have held (stripped of all operating system and other files) as many as, oh, six or seven of these 500 photos. Hell, the camera uses compact flash cards that I buy in 4 or 8 Gigabyte sizes (or 100 to 200 times the storage on that hard drive).

My cell phone has a mini-SD card holding 2 Gigs and it's about the size of the fingernail on my little finger (the SD card, not the phone).

The cell phone itself is smaller than a deck of cards, incorporates phone, camera, internet - including email of course - calculator, alarm, PDA, etc. It charges in a couple of hours and lasts many many hours of talking/surfing. It works in most of the countries on earth.

My portable GPS is a bit larger than a deck of cards, has comprehensive maps of the 48 contiguous United States as well as detailed city maps for both London and Paris. It relies on a constellation of satellites in orbit around the earth, all emitting timing signals which the unit receives and interprets to identify its position on earth to within a few yards by comparing those signals to its internally stored maps.

Then we have iPod, portable blood glucose meter, Kindle, digital cameras (still and video), laptop, etc. In one not very large backpack I can travel with an information library that would probably dwarf some of the largest libraries on earth present and certainly past (with a dedicated use miniaturized medical diagnostic device thrown in, too). That which I don't actually have stored as bits in the devices themselves is accessible through the internet connections and the 3G connection on the Kindle.

Should I choose, I could buy solar chargers for the goodies.  The cell phone can be configured as a wireless hotspot for the laptop so if I can't find WiFi nearby (increasingly unlikely) as long as I have cell coverage I'm still connected.  Add a webcam and I actually have a broadcasting studio in a briefcase.

I take my not-very-big backpack as one of my two carry-on items and get into planes. I sit in air-conditioned comfort in a reclining seat six and a half miles above the surface of the earth moving at 500 mph or better with even more on-demand entertainment, meals, beverages, etc. and in 10 or 12 hours go from California to Shanghai or London.

Personally, I never really stop marveling. People say I'm a gadgeteer but what I really am is somebody who is just agog over it all and what it can add to my life. Think about everything that went into designing the GPS satellite system - the conceptualization, building and launching and controlling the satellites and so on. And don't forget the maps - somebody somewhere has taken maps of all the roads and bridges and mountains and lakes and rivers and stuff (centuries in the making originally and then refined and updated with space imagery and computer design) and then digitized it all so that all those timing signals from all those satellites would actually be useful.

It's staggering.

Douglas Adams observed in his Hitchiker's series that the one thing you absolutely could NOT afford to have was a sense of perspective*. If one truly had a sense of perspective, one would sit staring at a GPS completely entranced at what the little box does, in fact, actually represent, until death from starvation or thirst finally put an end to the rapture.

Staggering.

 
*Can't remember which book right at the moment.  But it was in reference to the Total Perspective Vortex machine and its devastating effect on the human psyche.