Rick Watson

Syndicated Writer

Sunday, Mar 29, 2009

Do you ever get the feeling that technology is passing you by? The first commercial computer was built by the Rand Corpor-ation in 1951 and it weighed 13 metric tons. The beast had over 5,000 vacuum tubes and used more electricity than Jasper on the hottest day of August. Nowadays you can run a small country with a laptop computer that weighs less than a large pizza.  The more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don’t know squat.

I bought my first personal computer in the ‘80s and it cost more than a used Toyota. That was before Microsoft Windows so if you wanted the computer to do something, you had to type a long string of instructions on the keyboard. That was before the Internet and I spent countless hours learning how the thing worked. 

Then one day at work, a guy said, “You won’t believe this!” He launched a program called Prodigy. It dialed a modem connected to a telephone wire and bingo! — we were surfing the infant Internet. Instead of the PC being all alone on your desk, suddenly it was connected to other computers around the world. 

I began to see possibilities that had never occurred to me. That’s when the pace of technology started racing like a runaway train.

Before long, everybody was using e-mail to communicate; sharing ideas, pictures, stories and music. Electronic banking was in on the action early and suddenly everybody that was anybody had a Web site hawking everything from electronics to dating services.

It was then that I began to scratch my head. I wondered how it all worked, and where it was headed.

These days, e-mail is passé. Everybody is on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, which are all social networking sites/applications that allow people with common interests to exchange ideas and share information. Sometimes people share a little too much information if you ask me, but hey —this is a free country.

I became really befuddled recently when my niece Samantha convinced me to get an Apple iPhone when it was time for me to upgrade my old cell phone.

I was weary from the start. When the phone arrived in the mail, it came in a box that was about the size of two decks of playing cards stacked on top of each other.  The cell phones I’ve owned in the past came in boxes big enough to serve as a cat coffin if you happened to need one.

When it arrived, she came over and gave me a quick demo.  “You can take pictures, surf the net, do Facebook and Twitter, listen to music, write e-mails, get the current weather for anyplace on the globe, send a text message to another cell phone, get stock quotes, and real-time traffic,” she said in a burst. I thought at first she was speaking in Sanskrit because it was hard for me to get this old head around what she was saying.

“Can it tune my guitar?” I asked jokingly.

“Yes but you have to pay $1.99 for the application that does that.”  My jaw dropped.  She wasn’t kidding

So here I am, a 58-year-old with a gadget clipped to my belt that many kids would kill for. Do you want to hear something funny? I mostly use the iPhone to call my wife Jilda to tell her I’m on my way home.

I guess you could say that technology really has passed me by.