My Tech Autobiography

(From http://mehavecable.blogspot.com/)

In one of my early assignments here at college, I had to write a 500-word essay on my relationship with technology. I have expanded it, and it is presented below for what it's worth ...
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To say we did not embrace technology in our family is putting it mildly. My family were simple immigrant farmers and fishermen, fleeing from Eastern Europe during the war with only their suitcases and fears to accompany them. They came to a new, scary foreign land and, like many others, started from scratch. My childhood home was very low tech, very simple but happy. It was my parents’ wish to build a home, much like a bomb shelter that was safe and secure, and so the big, bad outside world would not seep in.

This was driven home to me, when I first approached my mom about going to York University in the late seventies. She was vehemently against it. She thought that drugs and foreign elements would corrupt me for the rest of my life. Imagine that, in most families to be the first to go to university would be an honourable event, but not in my house. I never held that against her, she was protecting me, like every loving mother should.

So my family was always leery of technology as it was seen as intrusive and invading. I smile each night when my 90 year uncle unplugs the microwave before going to bed. He thinks, somehow, horrible things will happen. Like it will embezzle him.

My first sense of technology was when we got a colour TV set in the late sixties. I recall vividly watching, with utter amazement, Star Trek with Spock’s bright blue uniform contrasting with that of Scotty’s fire truck red shirt. It just blew me away!

Like many others, I do remember watching, in awe, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, all from my living room.

And then there was the 1972 Canada/Russia summit series, LIVE from Russia... Not that hockey is on par with landing on the moon, although a Canadian might argue this ;-). It is that it was presented in real time, from behind the iron curtain, which in those days, might as well have been on the moon. The grainy feed just helped to make it more dramatic, more compelling.

Soon after, something called a ‘remote controller’ invaded our confines. It allowed one to no longer get up to change the channels. It was long and had a light brown, fifteen foot cord that attached to a darker brown box that sat on our RCA TV. There was a line of buttons adding up to thirty, and made a ‘kaa-chunk’ sound each time you depressed it. It was the same sound that our 8-track made in our Ford LTD. For the longest time, I thought ‘kaa-chunk’ was the sound of technology.

In high school, we had a mainframe computer, one of the few high schools in Toronto that had one. It was the size of a small foreign automobile. And had big spools of reel-to-reel tapes, rotating at it's own stop-and-go pace, much like what you see in the old, cheesy sci fi movies. It also had a card reader for inputting, well, cards. There were 2 kinds of cards - bubble (fill in with a lead pencil) or punch (using a punch card machine, of course). Each card represented one single line of code. So a large program, like a tic-tac-toe game (playing against the computer), would be quite a stack of cards for the student to delicately carry to the computer. It was always amusing watching students nervously staring at the card reader, as their precious cards sifted through the reader at a million miles an hour. And then the inevitable happens- one single, rebel card would not cooperate, and it was a horrible sound- "fffffffffffffffffffffffffff frupt!". Red lights would come on, everyone in the room would stop what they were doing, and there was this horrible millisecond of silence. The poor student frantically had to find out which card was the culprit, and run to the punch card machine and re-punch it - without error. Then, run back to the reader and carefully place it back in the stack and cross your fingers that everything will be fine. Everyone waits. Everyone's pissed off. Everyone hopes it doesn't happen to them when it's their turn. Yup - good times! This was cutting edge technology in 1976.

You know it's always funny in my hitech career when I share stories of the old mainframe days. The younger generation would gather around me, like I'm the elder of the tribe yarning stories of life before. "Me kill buffalo with rock... drink sky water...".  Kids these days... They don't know.

My next ‘awe’ moment was many years later when I first connected to the Internet from my kitchen table. I recall going to an Australian radio station and hearing an Aussie accent. My eyes were as wide as they could get. I’ve never been to Australia and yet there I was, bathrobe and all. At the time, it reminded me of the late nights in bed with a transistor radio trying to get the distant radio stations like Cleveland and Boston. Forget that – I’m in Australia now!

I still get some chills down my spine when I head to some web cams (i.e. Estonian ones like Tallinn, Tartu  and Saaremaa). Here is the land of my ancestry, and the sun is shining today. I show my uncle and he smiles.

My relationship with technology has been, as with many I suspect, series of pleasant surprises. I have graduated in many areas – from 45’s to ipods, from rotary phones to Skype and BlackBerries, from playing the board game Monopoly at the cottage to playing it on the subway on my cell. It continues to amaze and dazzle me, and I love being in the front seat waiting for the next big thing to happen.

Being in hi-tech for most of my career, I have been in the forefront of technology, but I am still my parent’s son. My proud ancestry roots are in farming and the sea and the simple things in life. I believe there is room for both in this world.

There are nights when my uncle forgets to unplug the microwave. And yes, I do unplug it for him.