technology

Occasionally, something happens to make me realize how quickly technology changes. That device we “can’t live without” today probably didn’t exist as little as five years ago.

I still remember a question my son asked me when he was about nine: “Mom, what Gameboy games did you play when you were a kid?”

He was pretty horrified when I told him my first handheld game was the Merlin (pictured to the right).

My first computer was an Apple 128. (The 128 stood for kilobytes, by the way.) Everyone told my mom to buy a Commodore 64 because “we’d never need more than 64 KB.” Oh how times have changed! On our last vacation, I had to make choices about which videos to take because my iPad 2 “only” has 16 GB.

I run into the rapid change all the time in my writing, most recently this morning. I made the decision to set my books in an actual time, as opposed to “generic 21st century.” In a scene set in the fall of 2010, I had a character “reach for his iPad.” Which led to a quick Wikipedia search (remember life before that?) to be sure iPads existed then. (Yes: The first generation iPad came out in April of that year. Character must have been an early adopter.)

It’s just weird to think that iPads are only three years old, and that the device I was using to write the scene didn’t exist in the time it was set in. Haven’t we had iPads and other tablets forever?

I’ve had to verify Android phone models, MacBook models and apps like Dropbox or Kindle for Android to be sure I wasn’t accidentally adding anachronisms to my stories. Dang it! My stories take place less than four years ago!

Hard to believe tech is changing that fast. I wonder what awkward questions my son will have to field from his children. Like maybe, “You mean you had to hold your phone in your hand?!”

NO COMMENTS

  1. Dan, looking back, I’m not sure if it was all that educational. I guess there was a good memory and logical component to it. I’d certainly approve of my own kids playing it. If you’re up for some nostalgia, here it is rendered in Java: http://www.theelectronicwizard.com/ (Fair warning, though: it’s crashing my Java today, which is odd, since it’s worked fine before now.) I think this is the third or fourth online discussion I’ve gotten into in the past couple of years about Merlin. Funny, because when I was eleven, I didn’t know anyone who had one. Get old, get married, and I find out it was my wife’s favourite toy as well.

  2. @David, thanks – that’s good stuff! And yeah … I don’t really remember anything at all about what the Merlin actually did – that is, how it worked. But I do have a foggy recollection that it was somehow memory-based; one of those games that gets impossibly hard once you get past the first few levels. (Nor do I remember if I even had one, or if I maybe just played the thing when I was over at friends’ houses. No idea.)

    Oddly, I have almost no memory of favorite childhood toys. But I do have a few book- and reading-related memories from way back when … which I guess makes sense, given my profession. I think I owe much of that to my mom.

    Don’t get me wrong – I definitely had a lot of toys. But my mom always went above and beyond in the books department. She would take me to the library and have me check out a few books, even when I didn’t want to. And she was a firm believer in the fact that kids who are read to when they’re young very often grow up to become serious and dedicated readers, and so I was read to all the time before I could read for myself. She was also really good about letting me choose my own books, and not forcing anything on me. In retrospect, that probably had more of an effect on my lifelong love of reading than almost anything else. Thank you mom!!

    Parents with young children: Please please please read to your kids! And don’t be afraid to let them read anything that want to read – even seemingly illiterate comic books, which I was personally obsessed with well into high school.

    Also: Try not to freak out if they start gravitating towards books that might seem odd for them. One the first-ever paradigm-shifting books I ever read, for instance, was “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” And then I went on to tackle the remainder of the Judy Blume library. And God bless ’em, neither of my parents freaked out about the fact that I was reading “girls” books. (Or rather, if they did, they didn’t let me know about it.)

    OK, soapbox rant over. (No idea where that came from.) Carry on.

  3. @Dan, I completely applaud any young boy who read and enjoyed the Judy Blume books!

    And glad to see that the Merlin is bringing up good memories. I loved that thing. I got it just before we left for a long train trip, and that thing made the trip way more fun than it would have been otherwise. Smart move on the part of my parents!

  4. LOL my first computer of my very own was a Mac Powerbook which had a 120 MB hard drive. That was so much, I was sure I would never fill it. My phone has almost 200 times the capacity!

    As for awkward questions from the kids, how about this one: in the old days, if you wanted to talk to somebody on the phone and they weren’t home, that was it. You just…didn’t talk to them. It would just ring and ring and they you’d have to go away and do something else for awhile. And you could only talk to them in certain rooms of the house because the phone was actually attached to the wall. Wild, huh?

    And how about the concept of needing to drive to the store to go and rent something just so you could watch a movie at home? And if someone else got there first and beat you to it, you were just out of luck?

  5. I loved Merlin as a kid! It did do memory games but it also had a thing where you could play music on it by tapping the lights if I remember correctly. The only thing I hated is that it was very loud, no volume buttons back then lol.

    Atari was THE game console to have after Pong….. who remembers Pong? Another great time waster of a game that kept me and my cousin amused for hours on end.

    In between these games and playing outside, do kids play kickball or stickball anymore, I loved to read. My mother had tons of books around the house and I had quite a collection myself by the time I was 10. My first ‘adult’ book was Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, I was 10 at the time and stole my mothers copy. I used to read past my bedtime by using a penlight flashlight under the covers and boy did that book creep me out at the time!

    While I love new tech I sometimes think that there is too much of it and human interaction has decreased since all the i-stuff and social media has come along. Oh well, time marches on.

  6. @Chris, I remember Pong. On my friend’s TV. And thinking it was just the coolest thing ever.

    @Joanna, really, you could once only talk in certain rooms in the house? 😉 I vaguely remember those days. Like when the most private phone was in my parents’ bedroom. Really awkward talking to your boyfriend on your parents’ bed. Some tech improvements really do make our lives better.

  7. Juli, I actually think the biggest shock for our grandchildren will be how non-customized everything was. I think they will learn programming in school the way way we learned typing, and the idea that when Grandma got her first phone, she just went to the store and took what they gave her will be appalling.

  8. Joanna, speaking of programming. I remember taking typing in Jr High and then computer programming, in DOS, in High school. I also remember our vocational school getting 5 brand new Apple Mac computers back in 1985 and having to program them for my teacher who just couldn’t figure it all out. The huge floppy discs that held next to nothing for memory and the black screen and bright green lines. It took me weeks to enter all of her work that she wanted on discs only to accidentally erase them a few days after I got everything done. I really feel old now lol.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.