Sputnik
I love technology. It’s the wonder of it that appeals to me. I think it started in the mid-50s when television came to 29 Palms where we lived on the Marine base. All the families in base housing gathered in the parking lot by the main office to watch a set they put up to show us what was coming. Then soon we had our own tv and life was all new and wonderful. Now I have a 55-inch LCD that plays pictures I stream. And that’s more technology I love, computers.
On Tuesday I knew I wouldn’t be able to write my morning essay and post it the next day. So, I wrote it that night, put it on my website, and scheduled it to post in my absence. It did it just fine. And that’s me and computers, and we go back to the days of tiny green screens, batch files, dos, and floppy disks. And again, it was just all the cool things those fine humming machines could do. Which brings me to the internet and the world wide web, another miracle that improved the quality of my life.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We flew a man to the moon, we have electric cars, our phones went from party lines to Palm Pilots and flip phones to smart phones, and now they’re everywhere. And every time some advancement came along, I was happy. I hope I never lose that sense of wonder, my appreciation for smart people doing brilliant things with their minds, like creating a vaccine in a year as opposed to the decades it took to create the polio vaccine that saved my life as a child. And that seems a nice capstone to a longish life lived in modern times. I wonder what’s next, because I hope I get to see it.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale