path: root/md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan.md

---
title: The Progress of Technology During my Lifespan
lesson: The brilliance we can find with our hearts will always far outshine that which can be produced by the minds of this world
---

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image1.jpeg){width="3.2291666666666665in"
height="5.112136920384952in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image2.jpeg){width="3.6458333333333335in"
height="3.90625in" alt=""}

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.

![]md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image3.jpeg){width="2.2916666666666665in"
height="1.53125in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image4.jpeg){width="6.25in"
height="2.125in" alt=""}

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.

![]md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image5.jpeg){width="1.8645833333333333in"
height="3.35625in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image6.jpeg){width="4.604166666666667in"
height="3.0520833333333335in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image7.jpeg){width="6.5in"
height="4.875in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image8.jpeg){width="4.52455927384077in"
height="3.2395833333333335in" alt=""}

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.

![](md/44_The_Progress_of_Technology_During_My_Lifespan-media/media/image9.jpeg){width="3.125in"
height="2.90625in" alt=""}

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.