You're so young!

Professor Thomas Suprenant's course, which might be informally titled 'History and Importance of Computers and Computing,' is the impetus for this blog, and his anecdotes are part of the inspiration. My initial readers will include many of my 20- and 30-something classmates, for whom I am virtually as fossilized as the prof. He could be my older brother, I could be their father, their kinda old father in some cases.

The professor likes to bring in 30 year old hard drives and memory chips to show us progress over what a minority of us see as relatively short periods. Mine is often the sole hand going up when he asks "who remembers...?" It is as though he and I were on the same side when the annual email circulates to 'faculty of a certain age,' reminding them that this year's freshman never lived at the same time as Amelda Marcos (so just put a lid on that old shoe joke).

Herewith, then, a few random things to make most of my classmates feel very young, rather than the obverse. (Hey, it's MY blog!)

-When an occasional car does emit visible or smellable exhaust, I can definitively diagnose a host of different specific conditions, but you kids, fortunately, rarely see visible vehicle exhaust. (Holed piston, bad rings, running rich, blown head gasket). No one my age finds this remarkable in the least, by the way.

-The young turks that persist, at this late date, in smoking tobacco as a hallmark of their rebeliosness or personal immortality, might envy me and my age-set for our slightly more innocent era. I had a flashback yesterday on campus to my 18-year-old self, in the front row of Philosophy 101, smoking a pipe. The only reaction all semester was someone wanting to know which tobacco blend that smelled so nice.

-I (or my brothers) watch the '40s movie where the soldier has to change a tire on the captured foreign car before he can drive back to his captain and save the day... and we have no trouble imagining ourselves in his place. We are the last generation (in the US at least) where our average peer could be plopped down in front of an unfamiliar car and still do basic things to it. Not necessarily smugly, we feel we could be plopped down in any previous era and readily adapt to the technology. Backwards compatibility, if you will.

It has gotten far beyond practical for even the highly motivated, to 'tour the factory,' or otherwise become familiar with the making and fixing of the things we depend on today. All of us, globally, are increasingly interdependent. Individually and nationally, we are getting inexorably more narrow and specialized. Some of us wonder if the old sense of personal technological independence which is now flickering out may be a metaphor for the new vulnerabilities our society has as it 'advances' to a service one from the more 'primitive' producing one...