Walking Blind into the Future
Looking back on the early 1990s shift from analog to digital
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
The Great Reorganization (Charlie Brown!) took nearly two years of my life, and honestly still isn’t done completely. While most everything I don’t immediately need in my life is packed up in totes (surely everyone remembers The York Hoard????), I still have six old plastic totes filled with what I call “The York Papers Archive.”
The York Papers are, as of yet, a haphazard collection of my parents’ paperwork and letters and artifacts from their lives, from high school year books (1936 for Poppa; 1956 for Mother) to their joint tax returns to letters they sent and received over the years to the remains of Mother’s inconsistent scrapbooking habit. I have a plan, I do! But for now, they sit in the janky old totes awaiting better days.
One of those totes I did repack, though, because it is mine and mine alone: my New College of Florida career-in-a-box:
That document propped up in the back is an official copy of my thesis, while all the folders represent classes I took or projects I worked on.
What is most interesting to me, though, is that little box sitting on the left. That, my dear friends who are too young to recognize it, is a box of floppy disks.
I know that by themselves they are not particularly interesting, nothing more than a footnote in the history of technology. They have been in storage for 30+ years, and it would be a miracle if any data on them is recoverable. Anyway, who needs four different versions of my graduate thesis in WordPerfect for Amiga file format?
Oh .wpd, how we miss thee!
What mesmerizes me though is the contrast: a big box of paperwork and a tiny box of data. This was the world I graduated into: the early 1990s shift from analog to digital.
It was a short walk off a short plank, honestly. We had no idea what was coming for us.
I was on the cutting edge by using a word processor to write my thesis. My school had one of the infamous “Mac Labs,” which was a classroom retrofitted to hold ten or more Apple Macintosh Plus computers donated by Apple in order to indoctrinate young impressionable minds into the Cult of Apple. (Spoiler: it worked.)
That said, I honestly don’t remember why I decided to write my thesis on the Amiga instead of one of the on-campus Apples. I certainly did a lot of work on those Macintosh Plus machines, from papers to creative writing to a very short lived, two-issue literary zine I pretentiously named Modus Operandi. I think at least one or two of the disks in that box are for the Macintoshes. Perhaps I wanted to be able to just “work from home” instead of traipsing to campus every time I needed to write? I remember that I borrowed the machine from my friend Victor, who (iirc) had just finished writing his thesis and was traveling, so offered to let me use it in lieu of him putting it into storage for a few months. Hashtag ForeverGrateful!
I rode the cusp into a new age the same way my father did. For him, born in 1923, it was the rise of airplanes and telephones and movies. He arrived during the era of post-WWI biplanes and died long after we landed on the moon. The first motion pictures he ever saw were probably silent ones, while his favorite VHS tape was the movie Silverado (1985).
We adjust to marvelous new things with alarming rapidity, I suppose. The amazing becomes mundane.
If you think this post is about A.I., it both is and isn’t. A.I. really is here to stay, even if everyone wholesale stops using LLMs (which I truly doubt will happen) because it represents an astounding breakthrough in technology.
Yes, the hype bubble will burst at some point, and then we will just be left with the tech, however useful it is or is not. It’s worth remembering that the dotcom bubble also burst pretty spectacularly and we’re all here 25 years later, using the “World Wide Web” (does anyone use that phrase anymore???) on the regular. That doesn’t mean that AI as we know it now is long for this world. Apple is still making the distant descendants of those Macintoshes, but who uses a Commodore Amiga anymore? Or even WordPerfect?
We never actually know where this is all going. The crystal ball is a bit cloudy.
True, one of the first movies ever made was A Trip to the Moon in 1902, when manned flight outside of hot air balloons was not a thing people did. And yet, less than 70 years later, a human stepped out onto the moon.
Was it prophetic? Was Jules Verne a time traveler? Did we go to the moon because we imagined doing it, or did we imagine it was possible because we knew we could do it?
Granny, born in 1898, used to tell me how much her father despised the advent of the telephone. He just thought they were unnecessary—newfangled gadgets of no actual value. And honestly, for a while, they were exactly that. They were a luxury…then they were trendy, then they were common, then they were a necessity. And then, of course, they became “smart.”
Apple set up those “Mac Labs” all over the country, knowing that the way to make their products indispensable to the next generation was to train people to use them first. Most of us who initially encountered graphic UI and a “mouse” did so without buying a machine for ourselves, because they were luxury items that cost a lot more than my car. They quickly became trendy, and as the “desktop computer revolution” rolled on, whether we bought Macs or IBM PCs, personal computers became common. Eventually, they became necessities. Then, of course, they became “smart” too.
(For all of us complaining about A.I. being shoved into everything, it’s worth remembering that the technique has a successful track record, however much we hate it.)
I was a late comer to smart phones because, like my great-grandfather griping about “a telephone in every house is excessive and wasteful!”, I did not understand why anyone needed the Internet on their mobile phone.
…Yeah, I guess we both got shown up there.
When I bought that box of floppy disks back in 1992, I was only vaguely aware of the seismic shifts of technology I was walking over. I still don’t have a clue as to what the future holds, despite a youth steeped in Future Shock and Neuromancer, but I’ve learned that the future will always surprise you, simply because we take the present for granted.
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