ruminations on technology

For some reason, the passing of Steve Jobs is unexpectedly haunting me.  I own no Apple products and I didn't know much about the man or the businesses he ran until recently.

I find myself feeling like I did when I read a biography of Bill Gates a few years ago:  fascinated that someone relatively close to my own age could have accomplished so much.  The decisions Bill made and the paths he chose have had a world-wide impact... and Bill was a nerdy kid, just like me.

With people recounting what was happening when Jobs and Gates were getting started, I was there:  I was around and knew when kids who played for hours on pinball machines migrated with their allowances to video gaming arcades; I worked on a WANG word processor at an insurance company for one college summer job; I remember people playing PONG on their TV sets and when Pac-Man took moutains of quarters to master, and when MTV arrived during my sophomore year of college.  I had friends who owned Sony Walkmans, the latest in portable music players.

(The WANG word processor was a gigantice step up from the second-hand Remington manual typewriter my parents bought when my dad was looking for a new job and had to type cover letters.  My high school graduation present from my parents was a new manual Smith Corona typewriter for college, which I believe cost about $100 in 1978.  It was the most expensive present I had ever received, and I am sure my parents thought long and hard before spending such an extravagent amount of money on just one child (when they had 5 more at home).  For comparison purposes, when my youngest sister finished high school 16 years later, in 1994, she recieved a digital typewriter that had a small digital read-out screen imbedded above the keyboard... which was the latest affordable technology for my parents for a child going off to college.  I believe the price of the word processor was about $150 at the time; again, it was the most expensive present my sister had ever recieved.)

I am not quite sure what all of this means, but I wanted to record it for posterity.