A few years ago a friend asked if I would present a seminar to his engineering grad students. All were PhD candidates and beyond me in education. After a little thought I said yes and went to the presentation with my slide rule that I had used when in college. We had a good time when I asked the students to set aside all of their electronic instruments including their cell phones. They would have to use the slide rule as their professor and I did. There was a lot of laughter, and only one of them had ever seen or heard of a slide rule. We had a good time discussing technology and its rapid advance.
One question they asked was a good one: what did I fear most about the rapid change in technology? I told them that my greatest fear was storage and records. I had been through floppy discs, tape drives and then small tape cassettes, which had all been replaced in just a few short years. I had seen 78 records replaced with 45s and then 33s. Those 33 LPs were replaced by tapes and then CDs. Old films had deteriorated and become unusable, and older tape records had become unreadable or there were no readers available. I mentioned that the only lasting storage of data was cuneiform clay tablets that were used four thousand years ago. The records we kept just a few years ago were being lost because of the media used, or the newer technology could not read the older recordings.
This seminar came back to me this week when I was trying to get my CDs to play in my cars that did not have CD players in them. After a lot of calls to friends and questions to former fellow employees, I finally had to download an Apple app on my computer and then transfer the CDs to the computer and then transfer them to my cell phone. One car will play them from the cell phone through bluetooth, and the other car I haven’t figured out yet, but I am told that I can hook my cell phone directly to the car and play the music that way. During this journey I was told to re-buy the contents of the CDs by downloading to my phone or use satellite radio. I have satellite radio in one car and internet radio in the other, but they still do not play the music that I like or care about. The new technology has put me out of the music listening business, and many places that sold CDs have stopped. You have to download any music you want and then figure out how to play it other than listen to it with ear buds and your phone. While the technology has caused part of this, the music and film industry has been the greatest pusher of this “new technology.” You cannot copy or lend your music or VCR tape anymore. You can record your TV shows and movies on DVRs owned by the cable and satellite companies. Making copies is possible on thumb drives in some instances but very difficult. When you lose your hard drive in the recorder, you lose all of your recordings.
I am still worried about the storage of important material, and other than paper it is difficult to expect someone to be able to read it after a few years. Even photographs are kept in electronic storage and usually on virtual drives or computer hard drives. Very few are printed anymore, which makes them vulnerable to being destroyed before the grandchildren can see them. In our approach to higher technology, we have become interested in instant gratification rather than looking for future use of the things we create. If we do not change this, we will be without a lot of history to use and enjoy in the future. Perhaps we should start using clay tablets again.
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