a conversation i had with a 96-year-old woman
I once made the mistake of asking a 96yo lady what she liked to watch on tv as a kid and she got a good laugh out of that before saying loudly, “I REMEMBER WHEN RADIO WAS INVENTED.”
technology compression gives current generations weird benchmarks they live through, but those at the beginning of the tech crunch, when it all started happening in a single generation for the first time… wow.
First you have to realize the long slow beginning. Back when our tools were made of rock, the form our tools took changed slower than our bones were evolving. Okay. For most of humanity’s time on this earth, our tools and technology stayed almost exactly the same for lifetime after lifetime, with upgrades and innovations coming in rare bursts.
My grandma tho. In her lifetime, she went from the invention of radio, to television, to desk top computers, to smart phones. As a child they would gather to sit around the radio and listen to their favorite programs in the evening. As a great-grandmother she had a picture frame that showed a slideshow of pics of her family that we would all upload to from our phones whenever we snapped a shot we thought she’d like. Can you imagine living through that change? Like first they had to invent television, then they had to colorize it, then they had to create the brand new animated show The Jetsons, and then that fictional futuristic shit started to be out in the world
She remembered crank-cars (where you had to wind a crank on the front bumper to start the engine) and she lived to see the first experimental cars that you could put a wireless sensor-filled hat on and THINK hard and the car would start (you know we made that happen, right? It was like 15 years ago)
She saw the space program unfold. When she was a baby, some people in town still used horses to get around, when she died, the sky was full of satellites. An explorer-souled lady who could pilot a plane herself, the progression of our traveling abilities was of special interest to her.
One of her first jobs, a restaurant, she told me they used to wash the dishes in the creek out behind it.
Speaking of restaurants, she remembered the check amount for the first fancy dinner date she went on. She remembered because it was a very nice place and she was real embarrassed at how much money he was spending on her: $10. That included several drinks, apps, dinner, dessert, and tip. Ten bucks.
Me, I was in a very awkward generation. Starting when I was 13 we had a computer in the house, but I didn’t ever live in a home with internet access until I was almost 30. Like, in my high school they had a classroom full of computers, and all freshmen were required to take the mandatory class held there, where they taught us… typing. They ONLY taught us typing. I look at my life now, and I think, christ it would have helped me if they had taught me anything about how computers actually worked. They were good models for learning the basics, those old clunkers, all black screens with a glowing DOS prompt in either orange or green. There was no such thing as a mouse, no desktop with folders, no drop down menus, just a blank black screen with a flashing cursor, and if you wanted to open the typing program, you had to type in the line of DOS code that would do that. Which was the only line of code they taught us.
The administration had no idea wtf computers were either – those computers? they were networked. To EVERY computer in the school (there was no such thing as the internet yet, so networks were very new and tricky things). Anyway, it turned out some kids figured how to get into the files that had the print-ready report cards and change the grades, because nobody new shit about shit and you could just type the line of right code to open the relevant files, and guess the most common passwords for administrator access (which as I recall, was “admin”) and then change your grades. A few hackers were born that month, I can tell you. Then they tightened up network security enough, but never did teach us anything about how computers worked.
Anyway, from 1900 to 2000 was a wild and weird time for technology. It’s going to get super crazy now, of course, but my niece and nephew and a lot of you have grown up with the concept that the technology is ever-evolving year to year, month to month, AND THAT SHIT IS BRAND NEW, CONCEPTUALLY, technology having sweeping changes every single year has never ever ever happened before, never, in over two million years of human tools and tech.
that’s why boomers and gen x are often so bad at tech. They were raised to believe that a new technology came out, you learned it, and then that was the only version of that technology you would need to know how to use for the rest of your life. Us millennials (I juuuuust make the cut on that one, on the oldest side) we grew up going from boombox to walkman to discman to ipod to spotify and pandora, and it gets tiring relearning such large shifts in the simple act of how I listen to music. But that’s just a mindset I was programed with, because for my niece, it’s just the normal way technology happens. And that’s super cool.
I really like how this ended with “And that’s super cool.”
We need that kind of positivity not often
