My husband and I watched as my granddaughter bounced from one side of her
living room in Tennessee to the other, showing us a large array
of toys and stuffed animals. Then she took us on a tour of her bedroom, digging
out buried treasures from under her bed, flipping switches on every musical toy
she owned.
At times she wasn’t much more than a blur of garbled pixels,
but the fact that technology spanned twenty-two hundred miles and let us get a
glimpse of her everyday life was priceless.
However, technology is moving at the speed of light. Items we believed to be indispensable thirty
or forty years ago, are now nothing more than a piece of history collecting
dust.
Transistor radios: At night I’d sit on our back porch and slowly
turn the dial, trying to pick up radio waves that drifted in the sky. Only
these weren’t local stations. Some,
depending on things like cloud cover, would come from thousands of miles away.
Slide rulers: I
never got the real knack for using them, but by sliding the middle of three
rulers back and forth, anyone could do mathematic equations such as
multiplication, division, roots, and trigonometry.
Vacuum tubes:
Prior to the early 1970’s and before semiconductors, you could open up the back
of a television or radio and find an array of vacuum tubes. They were a mystery
to me, but my father was an expert at swapping them out for new ones. I’ve learned they can still be found in some
audio equipment such as guitar amps, and high-end audio components due to their
reliability.
So maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps some of the technology
we have today will still hand around for awhile.
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