I just entered my 37^th year of life this past Sunday and I’ve been reflecting a lot on technology and how it has shaped and changed my life and world over the past 36 years.

I love technology and I also happen to be a very nostalgic person. A few recent experiences have made me consider how our age shapes our relationship with technology and our very concept of the future, the present and the past. It is the intersection of a person’s age and their relationship with technology that particularly intrigues me as I reflect on my own life.

My parents are not technical people at all. My mother spoke for years about learning “the computer” and has in the past few years started using email to keep in touch and using the internet to research our families’ genealogy, but that is about the extent of it. I’m proud of how far she’s come but my expectations for her ever truly entering the digital age are slim. It is also only in the past few years that she began to leave her cell phone on all the time and bring it with her, rather than leave it in the car “for emergencies only.”

I was totally surprised recently to find out that my father has a laptop! I’ve received one email from him, ever, and I know that the two lines he sent me were written under the careful supervision of my mother. I was tipped off by the fact that the email started, Dear Timothy and ended with Sincerely, Dad.

My parents are great people, but will always need to keep my number nearby, just in case they can’t figure out what button they hit on one of the two remote controls in their bedroom that made the picture on the TV disappear or “broke the cable.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum are today’s teens. I was at a local taco stand recently and sat at a table next to three teenaged girls. Each of them was busily texting on their cell phones and I asked them, jokingly if they were texting each other. They paused only long enough to laugh, give me a quick, curious glance and mutter, “NO” simultaneously and in a tone that could only be described as incredulous. That one word “NO” was the only word that I heard any of them say the entire time they were eating and texting.

So, where does that leave me, a 37 year old working in technology for the past decade? I am in awe of what technology brings to our world and how it advances ceaselessly, creating an ongoing stream of new and improved products and applications. I am a bit disappointed that Blu-ray seems to have taken the upper hand in the High Definition video format race, but only because my fiancé gave me a Toshiba HD DVD player for Christmas. I guess that I can file that in my collection of goods from the technology graveyard. As I said before, I am a bit nostalgic and so I guess I also feel bad for those three teenaged girls, who will never know some of the experiences that I have during my lifetime. I’ve catalogued a small list in the hopes that one of them comes across this blog, DIGGS it or posts the link on their Facebook page and they can experience a small piece of my past as we trudge off into the future together.

Selected highlights in technology from my past:

• Growing up in Philadelphia, my TV channels were 3, 6 and 10 (VHF) and 17, 29 and later 57 (UHF). The TV had two dials for tuning the channels 2-12 on the VHF dial and 13+ on the UHF. If the picture got a little strange, you could try adjusting the rabbit ears or playing with the Horizontal and Vertical hold buttons.
• Writing papers on our Macintosh computer and having to leave the house while the dot matrix printer was cranking out my handy work, the end of the cacophony signaling that my paper was done and it was time to tear off the perforated edges of the paper.
• A monumental break-through occurred during my sophomore year (1990) when Penn did away with waiting in line to register for classes and launched their new telephone registration system. It was, at the time, truly revolutionary.
• Printing out documents in Word Perfect at my first real job from my PC with no mouse, I had to hit Shift F7 and then 1.
• The joy of using IMDB when I finally did get a PC with a mouse and an internet connection. I no longer needed to memorize any actor or actresses credits. Gone too was the need to memorize any phone numbers for my contacts or use a Rolodex. I could store all of the info right there and email or IM them whenever I wanted.
• My first cell phone, a Motorola flip phone! (My favorite phone, however is my Motorola “brick” phone that I bought on e-bay a few years ago. In particular I like the 3 buttons that make up the phone book.) No more checking the land line to see if anyone was on the phone or asking my sisters to let me know when they were off the phone.
• Playing Pong and Breakout on our first video game console and later playing Zaxxon, Qbert and Donkey Kong on our CollecoVision and then Mike Tyson’s Punchout on our Nintendo NES.

I love that I got to experience all of these things. They are part of what makes me who I am and have helped mold my life experiences. I suppose one day in my future, I’ll be the one reaching out to my kids to explain some new technology that I can’t even imagine yet. For now, I am just happy to play my part in the unpredictable journey and ever changing digital world that we all live in, where things fade into the past at an ever more rapid pace. It’s always good to remember that as those things do fade away, we should be ever mindful that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Fax me if you have any questions about any of this, Dad.