The Progress of Technology During my Lifespan

This article is a collection of memories about various technologies that changed quite a bit as I grew up. I hope the pace of change during my lifespan might be interesting and help prepare my progenitors for an even faster pace in the future.

Telephones

When I was younger than 6 years old, I often visited Grandpa Williams’ farm with my family. They had an old telephone mounted on the wall in the living room. To operate it, the user had to pick up the earphone from its hanger and hold it to their ear. It looked somewhat like the picture below.

Then, the user had to crank the handle on the right to get the operator’s attention. The operator would ask what number you wanted to connect with. After verbally telling her the desired number, she would manually make the connection at the central phone connection board where she was located. Then the user would again crank the ringer to make the phone ring in the home of the person to whom they wished to speak. The two parties had to communicate by standing by the wall phone and speaking into the microphone while listening with the earpiece. I would have loved to play with this fascinating contraption, but it was mounted on the wall out of reach of grubby little fingers. We never owned a phone like this in any of the houses I lived in, but I vividly remember my grandparents using it.

While living in Oregon City, I was probably about 9 or 10. I remember an experience when I was playing with the phone. When I picked up the receiver, I could hear someone else having a conversation with a third party. I thought I was safe listening in on the conversation. I must have been a heavy breather because shortly thereafter one of the people on the line scolded me for listening in on their private conversation and threatened to report me to the phone company. In those days, it was common to share a phone line with multiple other families. It was common courtesy to hang up the phone if you attempted to use it while another person on your party line was already using the phone. You just had to wait your turn. I learned my lesson that day that if you were going to snoop on a neighbor’s conversation, you had better be quiet about it.

Most of my life was spent using the common rotary dial phone. I remember how exhilarating it was to start using the push-button phones because you could dial your number so much faster. We didn’t have a cell phone until about 2003 when we lived in the little Fisher’s Landing house. Our first cell phone was a flip phone and we only had one of them for both Lori and me. During the 13 years we lived in the homestead house in Ridgefield, we had both a land line and personal cell phones. We finally made the jump to wireless only when we moved to Meridian. Now the problem is that the younger grandchildren are always begging to use our phones and iPads for their own personal entertainment system.

Television

My family had a black and white television when I was a young boy living in Lakeview. I remember how temperamental these TVs were in those days. You often had to play with the rabbit-ear antennae on top of the television box to get decent reception. Sometimes one person had to physically hold onto one of the ears to get a picture. Then we had to rotate and take turns holding the antenna while the rest of the family watched. You had to change the channel on this TV by turning a knob on the set box. Remote controllers were still years away. Generally, we only had three channels to choose from: NBC, CBS and ABC.

Lori and I got our first color television shortly after we were married and living in an apartment while going to school at BYU. Thus, all our children only ever experienced color television, but my childhood only knew black and white. This is what we were watching when I saw the Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon in 1969. Flat panel television was still years in the future too. We used the old cathode-ray tube technology all the time we lived in Maine from 1989 to 2002. We finally got our first flat-screen plasma TV shortly after I left Hewlett-Packard in 2009.

Calculators

When the family lived in the Ridgefield house, dad worked as a manager of a loan office. He occasionally brought home adding machines to do some work at home. These were mechanical machines that used an electrical motor to turn the gears that did the actual math operations. I remember playing with these and having great fun telling the machine to multiply a number like 25 times 41. The machine would make a loud racket for several minutes, something like ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk…… and finally, ka-ching. The answer would be printed out on a white slip of paper. It looked a lot like this picture.

One evening dad brought home the first electronic calculator. He was trying it out to see if they wanted to replace the old mechanical machines with these new silent ones. It looked a little bit like this one below.

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I remember playing with it to see if we could confuse it. It didn’t take long to push random keys until the electronics got stuck in some infinite loop. The number display would go crazy and show some flickering gibberish that never stopped. The only way to get it to stop was to unplug it. It was my first job as a quality control tester and I quite prided myself in being able to outsmart these dumb machines.

After graduation from Ridgefield High School in 1971, I went to my first year of college at Clark Community College in Vancouver. I remember taking an advanced calculus course, but this was taught from a book and didn’t require any kind of calculator. My brother Tom and I went to BYU in Provo, Utah the next year to begin the electrical engineering program. We were told that we would need a slide rule for some of our math and science classes. A slide rule looked like the picture below.

These were quite effective at calculating the product of two numbers quickly, but you could only get about 2 digits of accuracy, so they could only be used to get a rough estimate. I used one of these all that firs year at BYU and then went on my mission to Brazil.

By the time I got back from Brazil and returned to BYU, the world of calculators was about to change. In 1975 when I was back at school, I was able to purchase a Hewlett-Packard 25 calculator like the one below for less than $200.

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I’m not sure if the general school population of students felt this way, but in the engineering school, the HP-25 was a very big status symbol. I had a little carrying case with a belt loop on it so I could take my calculator with me everywhere I went. When I was walking around campus with this baby hung from my belt, I felt like I was Mr. Cool himself. However, this was probably one of the first things that caused me to deserve the label of “Nerd”. I didn’t care. In my own mind, I was a cool dude and could leap over tall buildings with a single bound.

Computers

When I was going to college, computers existed, but not for individuals or families. They only existed as main frame computers that filled a large room like the picture below.

When I was attending BYU, I worked for the school as a night-time computer operator of their main frame computer in the engineering building. My shift went from 2am to 6am several nights a week. I usually brought a pillow with me in case the demands of the job allowed me to catch a few winks. Very few other students were on the computer at this time of night, so I took advantage often to get a little rest. My duties were similar to what is depicted in the picture. I sat at a little desk close to the console printer and waited for a request to load a magnetic tape needed by some program. You can see the woman in the background loading one of these large reels of magnetic tape onto a tape reader machine. I guess BYU was too poor to hire an assistant for me because when the request came in on the console, I was the one how had to leave my desk, locate the correct tape reel from the big racks on the wall and load it onto the reader machine.

Sometimes the computer would just crash. Believe it or not, this IBM-360 main frame, which cost millions of dollars, crashed quite often. The only way I knew this had happened was when all the blinky lights just stopped blinking. The solution was to go to the console drawer and fetch the fan-folded bundle of punched paper tape that was the reboot tape. I would load the paper tape into the console reader and push the reset button. The console then rebooted the system and all the lights started blinking again.

This large computer room was essentially a big refrigerator. The room had massive air conditioners running all the time to get rid of all the heat generated by all the electronics in the room. I usually had to wear my coat while on the job because of all the movement of cold air. All the equipment bays you see in the picture were connected by miles of cables, but you can’t see them because the floor is raised to allow the cabling to run under the floor. If any repairs were ever needed, the floor panels could be removed to expose all the cables underneath the floor.

You may be wondering how people actually used this computer. There were rooms full of monitor screens on campus where students could connect remotely to the computer to submit small jobs or check status of a previously submitted job. For larger computing jobs, the student had to write the Fortran program onto punched paper cards using a key-punch machine shown below.

There were rooms full of these machines on campus, too, where students would sit for hours punching in each line of their programs onto cards that looked like this.

The cards were carefully collected into decks and placed into a deck box for submission to the computer operator. A large program could require a deck box that weighed as much as 20 pounds. If you ever dropped the box, it was game over, because there was no way to know how to get the cards back into the correct order. After submitting your deck to the operator, you had to come back in a few hours or the next day to see if your program had been executed by the main frame. To execute a program, the operator had to place the deck of punched cards into the card reader machine to read it into the computer’s memory for execution.

You can imagine the anguish caused by a typo in one of your cards in the card deck. This meant that the card had to be re-punched and the deck re-submitted. Sometimes, you had to wait for many hours for some of the research programs ahead of you in the queue. They could run for hours before they finished. Still, with all the challenges of submitting a program and debugging it if the program had an error, it was simply amazing what this computer could do. I was dazzled by all the blinky lights and moving tape reels. I considered it quite an honor to be able to work with it even at 2am in the morning. I had no idea that within 30 years all this computing power could be carried around in your shirt pocket.

While living in our first starter home in American Fork, another computer revolution was happening. It was finally possible to be able to buy a computer for personal use. We used a special loan program offered by our credit union to buy one of the first models made by IBM. It was called the IBM Personal Computer or just IBM PC and it cost about $3500 to buy what you see in the picture below. It took us over 2 years to pay for it and it really couldn’t do much. There was no internet yet, so the best use I could put it to was to write a simple program in BASIC to help balance our checkbook. I remember buying a book to teach me how to implement a graphics algorithm called Bresenham’s method for drawing a line with pixels. My program was twice as fast as the BASIC language’s algorithm for drawing a straight line, but I never got to the point where I could use all this awesome graphics power to do anything entertaining like a video game.

Lori was not very impressed either. She was quite incensed that you had to talk to the machine by typing extremely cryptic commands that had to be exactly right or it would give you an equally cryptic error message. These were the days before Bill Gates have us an operating system that made interacting with a PC a much more pleasant experience. The computer looked exactly like the one below.

The rest of the computer story is probably familiar to most of my children. The next computer we had in the home was a refurbished Macintosh that was provided at a modest price by Signetics, my employer. It still only had a single-color monitor, whose screen phosphor was kind of a yellowish-amber, but the user experience was so much better than the previous IBM PC that we never looked back. All the succeeding computers in our home were made by Macintosh until I went back to school in 2004. I bought a laptop that had the Microsoft operating system on it for my classes in computer science. Since that time, Lori always had Macintosh computers and I always had a Microsoft one. It’s a miracle that we could still get along after such a radical divergence in computing preference, but eternal principles helped us get through it.

Well, there you go. I have exhausted my memory banks about my experience with technology during my lifetime. The main thing I learned from writing this article was that the pace of change in technology is accelerating. It won’t be long before Artificial Intelligence will be competing with our own intelligence for mastery of our lives. We must be careful to seek for truth with our hearts and not let the knowledge of the world dazzle us with its brilliance. The brilliance we can find with our hearts will always far outshine that which can be produced by the minds of this world.