19 August 2013

Today's topic: Digital Revolution Evolution: Chapter 2

I took a little trip down memory lane and arrived somewhere in the 1980's, wearing a Casio C-80 calculator-watch, which as memory serves me was the first digital 'hybrid' I'd ever owned. I've possessed a few hybrids in my 55 years. Most notably (or at least most easily recalled) were an amplified mouthpiece for a tenor saxophone I played in high school plus a baby blue Ford Pinto with a 6 cylinder motor and an automatic '3 on the floor' transmission, which I was told was an experimental drive-train at the time. It was an experiment that failed as it had more mechanical problems than it was worth, but that's another blog entry for another day.

Ads for Casio's C-80 calculator-watch touted it as "THE WATCH THAT REPLACES EVERYTHING". A bit of an exaggeration, but it was rather avant-garde to say the least. At a touch, the time in any of 11 world zones, a calendar, a stopwatch and an 8 digit calculator! It couldn't display photos, play mp3 audio or mpeg video like my iPod Classic which in addition to playing audio and video, can do everything the C-80 did plus play games, carry my address book, etc., however to make this sort of comparison is to ignore evolution, a by-product of the revolution.

History books, museums and now virtual books and museums all over the web illustrate how when history is recorded and reported faithfully the process and by-products of evolution may be viewed virtually all at once. That's the nature of hindsight. Foresight is another kind of vision. It isn't so neat and tidy. Sometimes seeing what isn't there, foresight can also manifest by seeing what is there but in a whole new way.

Geeky, cumbersome and ridiculous could well be the words used by a younger generation to describe any number of technological breakthroughs of yesteryear. A fair assessment. Don't take it too seriously though or you won't be able to chuckle at old photos of just how silly we looked back in the day making 'fashion statements' that were 'the norm' for the era in which we lived, 'statements' that by today's standards are truly laughable. How cool we thought we were with the 'technology of the day' in the form of the latest gadget, many of which became obsolete in the course of our lifetime. More than a few of us are old enough to remember rotary phones. I dare say there was a time when that particular mode of communication seemed 'space-age' in comparison to its predecessors.

On the timeline of evolution everything is relative.

Continued next time…

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