Today is my Dad’s birthday, so I’m thinking about him. I’ve posted about him before and thought I’d share something today, but I didn’t want to repeat myself too much so I took a little trip back through my Activerain archives this week to take a look see and that proved to be quite revealing.
One thing really stuck out and that was how much my technology has changed since I started blogging in the rain back in November 2008.
One of my early posts back in March 2009 included a little video. The soundtrack was from an evening I sat in with Dad at Cavallini’s in Cle Elum (1976).
As I'm reading I start to laugh...
I’m listening to tunes on my iPod. Does anyone still have one?
I used a Flip Mino camera to shoot the video. I had two, they're both dead in a drawer somewhere.
My phone, a Blackberry 8330 in my shirt pocket. Small screen, but I liked the keyboard.
I had a Dell Latitude D610 with 512 Mb RAM, 40 GB hard drive, Windows XP and it was heavy. It had WiFi, but hardly anyone except a few hotels had it then and you had to pay extra to use it!
I lugged a projector around that cost about $2,000, weighed over 10 lbs, had fuzzy focus, but you could heat a large room with it.
This morning 2008/2009 seems like a very long time ago from a certain technology point of view.
Who’d a thought then that over 70% of us now online are on a mobile device! That we’d text more than talk, yet ironically many talk to text! My iPhone 6 Plus is my office and my portable media production center. I have a Magnasonic mini projector that’s light with WiFi, USB, HDMI, Bluetooth, audio out, runs on battery for about an hour, and it’s footprint is smaller than my phone and cost about $300.
My HP laptop has a beautiful high resolution 1080p screen, uses 802.11ac high bandwidth WiFi, and it’s so light I have to check my tote bag to make sure I didn’t forget it.
I rarely burn CDs anymore and most of the software I use is cloud based. I can read and write to my French cousin using a translator, live stream video from several platforms, video chat instantly, and augment reality with Pokeman GO. Let alone talk to Cortana, Siri, or Google to search, map, and shop. That’s a lot of change in just a few years...
It’s all a matter of perspective. When Dad picked up his first accordion in the early 1930s they weren’t electric. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that he’d attach a ‘silver dollar’ microphone and use a tube amp.
I remember him talking about the first radio to show up on Tobin Avenue when he was a kid. The neighbors would gather on the front porch to listen to shows like Amos n’ Andy, Bing Crosby, and Burns and Allen.
His first recording device was a wire recorder. We played with it as kids in the late 50s. The wire would often break then instantly spring off the reels into a great big tangled ball that would take us hours to unravel. In the 1970s Dad got his first all new bleeding edge electronic organ accordion built for him by Petosa Accordions of Seattle.
I’m thinking my time is coming and before you know it I'll be hearing, “Grandpa, back in the olden days did you.......?” ;O)
So, Happy Birthday Dad! You'd a been 95 today! It's been fun running 'then and now' threads about you and technology.
Enough about work... let’s go for a drive originally posted to Activerain on March 10, 2009.
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