Electro-Magnetic Personal History

Maybe for First time Ever Daughter Took No Photos Of Granddaughter Yesterday
Had a Backup Supply

As I sit here typing something that will eventually appear on a blog I created (with a lot of help from my daughter) and edit daily I’m a little flummoxed by how far we’ve come in the electro-magnetic spectrum in a relatively short span of time. The next generation finds this hard to credit because they’ve grown up immersed in technology with all the inherent benefits and attendant warts. My one year old granddaughter is already thumbing through menus on her parents’ IPads and is drawn like a moth to the flame whenever one of these devices is left within reach.

When I was a young captain in the late 1980s computers were huge and I had a young Soldier assigned to my office who was the only one trained on using one of the mysterious beasts. I remember sitting beside him as he typed in various reports and having him do all the mundane edits that would seem ridiculous in today’s world. I owned my first home computer in the early 1990s when I was studying for my first Masters’ degree. I found I was a much better student with one of these things where I could actually make changes to typos without reinventing a typed sentence to match what I had mistakenly typed. I had a use a huge floppy disk to boot the computer up. I also had access to a university computer lab where I first fell in love with spell check – a love affair that continues to this day. If you could only see what the initial typing of this blog entry looks like you would understand. It was also around this time that I played my first ever computer game. It was an Apache helicopter flight simulator which I enjoyed but I never got hooked on computer games, something my sons’ generation grew up with idolizing.

During my time as a major in Hawaii in the mid-1990s I first got exposed to email both personally and professionally. My AOL email account proved to be a great life line during a tough time as it allowed me to connect back to Great Aunt and Soxfather during a difficult time. Professionally it started a trend that has continued to this day. I had just returned from a Middle East rotation and was moved to the Division staff. I’d come in to work at 6am and find 15 to 20 emails waiting for me from a hyper G3 (the division operations officer) who’d come to work in the early morning hours each day. I then spent the rest of the day working the issues he’d sent out at oh dark thirty. Nowadays I’d love to have only 15-20 emails daily. I can usually count on between 120 and 300.

In the late 1990s while living in Kansas we upgraded to a Pentium home computer and the internet started to appear as both my kids, young teens at this point, took to this expanded world of information as if they were born to it. It took a lot longer to load back then. If a picture, not to even conceive a video, was involved you’d have to sit and wait while it loaded in agonizingly slow fashion. The internet was always accessed over the phone line so all phone calls were interrupted when someone was online. This didn’t sit well with a certain, phone addicted Panamanian. I was usually the dinosaur. I remember getting angry with my daughter for saving a rudimentary word document on the hard drive. I was scared she would use up too much disk space, not realizing she could have saved an entire book without issue. I clearly remember her patiently trying to explain this to me. I realized at this moment how far ahead of me she was already in this arena – a trend that’s continued to this day.

The early 2000s saw a true explosion of technology and the internet. Both of my kids headed to college and each left with a personal computer of their very own. My son reported problems with his and also that he’d taken the thing apart and repaired it. I knew at that point I was hopelessly outclassed in the tech area by this generation. To their credit they never tired of trying to drag me kicking and screaming into the info age. They are still my info gurus. Whenever my wife or I can’t get a system to work it’s usually de rigueur to place a call to one of the two to talk us through fixing the issue; they’re both really good sports about it.

Two Projects Proceeded Yesterday 

Since retiring from the military probably the biggest innovation of all has occurred, the advent of smart phones. I can now do easily within seconds on a smart phone what that young Solider and I labored at back in the 1980s. It’s certainly changed the world as we can now pick up a phone or tablet to video chat with the far flung computer prodigies we produced or even my wife’s family down in Panama. I don’t miss the typewriter, at all. Young whippersnappers don’t know how easy they’ve got it. Instead of deep snow treks to school my generation complains how we used to bear with dial up internet connections.

Still the Dancing Quee (Princess)