Time. Space.

My grandmother grew up in rural Idaho. Her family did not have indoor plumbing until after she graduated from high school. All of her food was cooked on a wood stove. They did have indoor electricity though.

I can not imagine a life lived, for decades no less, with no indoor plumbing and having to cook all of my food over a fire essentially. Wow.

Talking with one of my friends he mentioned how his grandparents must have felt when they saw their first airplane. They lived in rural India under similar circumstances. To still be collecting firewood each day and then for the first time see human being flying through the sky. Wow.

From the book "Turning's Cathedral" by George Dyson: The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). (it is a very thinking heavy book, but if you're interested in how computers and nuclear weapons were developed hand in hand, check it out!)

I didn't own a computer until 1996, my freshman year of college. Some hand me down from my dad's office where it took 20 floppy discs to load Windows onto it. Needless to say I can remember an educational period before computers. I never had to turn in a paper in high school that was typed and printed from a computer. They were all hand written. Heck I even tried a computer programming class in high school and it was in Basic. Essentially writing simple mathematical formulas to solve word problems.

I dropped out.

My recent birthday and reading the aforementioned book have made me somewhat nostalgic. Reminiscing on my growing up this makes me wonder what things I have seen happen in my life that someone now takes totally for granted.

In no particular order or significance are I remember a time before....

-the internet
-diet coke
-compact discs
-laptops
-ABS on cars
-car seat and seatbelt laws
-atari
-debit cards
-digital cameras
-grocery store self check out

Almost everything people take for granted now that developed in my lifetime is the result of the shift from an analog life to a digital life. A world where numbers DO something rather than just MEAN something.