Progress During a Long Life

 

Progress During a Long Life

 We 21^st century moderns carry access to all the world’s information in our pockets or purses, in the form of an IPhone or  “smartphone” or “tablet”, that can connect wirelessly to all of this information, pretty much wherever we are in the world.

 It wasn’t that long ago, that if you needed to research something, you went to a library and found and opened an encyclopedia or dictionary or other reference source in book form, and looked up the subject.  Nowadays, you can pull out your smartphone, access the Britannica Encyclopedia or Webster’s Dictionary, or many other sources online, and get as concise or complete an answer as you wish.

 I’m an old guy, and my origins are in a little hill town in Western Massachusetts that was not even connected to the electrical grid during the Second World War, much less TV and internet.  I did homework by kerosene lamplight until my father installed a 32 volt generator and batteries to provide light, other than by candle or kerosene lamp.

 I attended a one room school with eight elementary grades.  From seven years of age onward, I started the fire in the pot-bellied stove before classes started on cold winter mornings.  Cherry Hill School was about a quarter-mile from our house, and the school is now a dwelling.  My nephew and his family now live in the old homestead, and my sister lives next door to them.

 We spent a lot of time outdoors. Swimming, pickup baseball and football, berry and mushroom picking, climbing trees and building forts in the woods in summer; sliding, skating and rudimentary skiing in winter; fishing and hunting when a little older.  Guns for hunting were tools to be learned about and respected, like other home and farm tools that could hurt you.

 News, primarily of how our troops were doing in WWII, was provided by the local newspaper, the “North Adams Transcript”, and radio, with Edward R. Murrow and others.  Radio also carried “The Lone Ranger”, “Green Lantern”, “The Shadow”, “Little Orphan Annie”, “Red Ryder” and other great and absorbing radio programs.  I got interested in the Boston Red Sox early on, and listened to, and scored their games.

 On many winter nights, AM radio signals would bounce off the ionosphere and provide reception of the “The Grand ‘Ol’ Opry” from WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, as well as stations from Indiana, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and from all over the country.  

 My first car was a 1937 Plymouth that I bought for $25.  It had faulty brakes, and my father helped me fix them.  We repaired and rebuilt our own cars, tearing down and restoring the internals of engines if necessary.  We also did our own carpentry, electrical, plumbing and other house repair and construction jobs.  This was knowledge that I took into adulthood, and used for my own cars, houses and life in general.

 My father built the house that we lived in, with help from friends experienced in the more esoteric building trades. I was taught early on that self-sufficiency was a virtue, and if you didn’t know how to do something, you learned how, and pretty much did most things yourself, relying only on more expert knowledge as a last resort.

 Of course, I lived through myriad inventions and innovations through the years.  TV, (one station, WRGB, from Schenectady, New York), came in 1948-49.  It was 50 miles away, so we needed a sizable antenna pointed at it.  I had an old Webster wire recorder with which I had a lot of fun.  Radios became smaller, and the current high-quality FM radio became ubiquitous during the 1950’s and 1960’s, after operating in two separate frequency bands for several years.

 I received my Chemical Engineering degree in 1959 using a slide rule to do all of my engineering coursework calculations.  Mechanical calculators and “Red eyed monster” electronic calculators soon followed in the 1960’s, costing thousands at first, then dollars, and then pennies soon thereafter.

 The first IBM computer that I used professionally was an IBM 704 in the old Union Carbide Building in NYC (now JP Morgan Chase corporate headquarters), that Caltex paid $600/hour to use.  It took up half of a NYC office floor, and was called a “704” because it had 4000 bytes (4kb) of memory.  I now have more, of a much more advanced type of memory, in my watch.  We punched our own IBM cards, carried them across the street in cans, and fed them into the card readers.  We changed out the “breadboard” in the massive computer to make a refinery simulation run, rather than an accounting run.

 Mankind went to our moon in 1969 using telemetry and about 2mb of computer memory.  You cannot buy such a small amount of memory these days.  The smallest modern flash drive is 2gb, about 1000 times the size of memory used to send Apollo 11 to the moon.

 Industrial computers became smaller, faster and more powerful, and hand-held calculators became promotional and give-away items. The invention and use of transistors and solid-state devices led to the conversion of mechanical and analog devices and data to more efficient digital form, and to an explosion of technology that resulted in world-wide digital networks.

 The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model), developed in the late 1970’s facilitated the proliferation of digital communications, and eventually, the internet, which was “wired”, at first, but soon became portable and “wireless”.  Devices using this technology proliferated, and really took off with the introduction of the first IPhones by Apple Computing in 2007.

 It would take a tome to track all of the technology and inventions of recent years, but some that quickly come to mind are video recording and improvements, CD and DVD technology, USB and flash drives, smart TV’s, more powerful smartphones, faster and more powerful wireless devices, smart appliances, and on and on.

 I’ll end here in our modern 21^st century world, having started in the 1930’s and 1940’s in a completely different and much simpler world.  My progeny might be writing a further chapter from their home on Mars or one of the gas giant’s moons, or from their vehicle in space.  I hope that human intelligence will continue into the future so that can happen.

Ray Gruszecki

July 31, 2021