The Future Was Yesterday

Paul Haney was a customer before he became my friend.  I sold him several computers, and somewhere during the business we did together, Paul and his wife, Jan, became important to The Doc and me.  So he was a little disappointed when I sadly announced that I had sold the company and we were leaving Galveston for the mountains and high desert of Southern New Mexico.

"What's so good about a desert?" he asked.

"Well," I answered.  "You would just have to go see for yourself."

So Paul and Jan did.  They went on vacation to New Mexico the very next week.  And when he returned two weeks later, he announced that I had been right.  He and Jan had bought a cherry orchard in High Rolls, New Mexico.  They actually moved to New Mexico months before The Doc and I managed to make the move.

You may know Paul, too.  If you, like I, lived vicariously through the astronauts of the Sixties, then you have certainly heard Paul--he was the "Voice of Mission Control" through the Gemini and Apollo programs. 

Long before I had a blog, I used to write a lot of letters.  I recently found one I wrote to  Paul almost fourteen years ago.  At the time, the whole nation was obsessed with Y2K and the coming new millennium.

Sunday, December 19, 1999

Dear Paul,

I'm supposed to be grading papers.  I keep sneaking away to do something else.

We bought a cheap breadmaker the other day.  Dillard's had a $30 model.  Karen and Sonja, a neighbor, looked at it and Sonja bought it.  It worked pretty good, but only made a one pound loaf of bread.  Karen thought the bread was good, so she bought a slightly bigger version that makes a 2 pound loaf for $80.  Somehow, it has become my breadmaker.  So, I loaded it up late last night and set the delay to come on this morning early enough that I could eat fresh bread while watching Meet the Press.

After I had the breadmaker ready, I ground some coffee beans, loaded the coffee pot and set it to go off just as the breadmaker was finishing baking the fresh bread.  All the while, I'm watching a news program out of Seattle on the satellite TV system.  There was a loud party down the street, so I put all the outdoor lights on the motion sensor mode.  I finished cleaning up the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and put it on a 2-hour delay so it wouldn't come on until everyone was asleep.

Before I went to bed, I turned off the lawn sprinkler system, since the temperature was supposed to drop to freezing during the night.  The grass is still green (Isn't southern New Mexico great!) and will water it once a week until it turns brown.

Just before going to bed, I turned off the TV in my office and shut down the computer that has been downloading a new version of Internet Explorer for the last two hours.  The only email I had received that evening was the new Dave Barry editorial in the Miami newspaper.

(Okay, I admit it, I stole the cartoon from his column.)  By now, I am sure you have gotten the point of all of the above.  Maybe the 21st century came a while back and we didn't notice.

I may have more toys than most people, maybe I like little techno gadgets more than most, but there is something unreal about the last 10 years or so.  I exchange messages fairly routinely with people who live so scattered around the world that not even Phileas Fogg could visit them all in three months.  My children do their homework from databases around the globe.  I did most of my Xmas shopping from stores that are so distantly remote that I have no idea what state they are located in.

Almost everyone I know has an email address.  The only exceptions are children and the elderly.  And not all of either of those categories.  As much as we have talked about a computer revolution or an internet revolution, we are barely halfway through the changes.  The internet is almost 50 years old, at least the concept is.  In 1953, Robert Heinlein wrote a story called Methuselah's Children, where the hero shopped for new clothing over a computer terminal, examining clothing styles and colors until he was satisfied.  He pressed a credit slip to the screen and placed his order.  The functional difference between that and how I order books from Amazon is too minuscule to notice.

Even five years ago, while shopping this way might have been possible, it would have been very strange.  This Christmas, no one knows how much E-Commerce (how old is that word?) is going on, but it may be as much as 15% of all gift shopping.  How much more is coming?  Will ATM machines turn into internet kiosks?  They better, because the need for cash is all but over.  I access my bank online nearly every day.  Will malls vanish?  How much computing power will my car have?  Will notebook computers become more common than briefcases and backpacks?  Will my next cell phone have a GPS?  A camera?  A screen?  Will the word 'film' become as obsolete as 'phonograph?'

Between Karen's office and our home, we own a fax machine, two copiers, two scanners, two cell phones, a satellite dish, three stereo systems, a DVD player, 3 VCR machines, 6 computers, 3 laser printers, and two color inkjet printers.  We own twice as many computers as television sets.  Ten years from now, what will an updated list reveal?  How many of those systems will have merged?  How many will have disappeared?  Will we wonder how we ever got along without polymorphs?   Or whatever the next new gizmo is.

Sorry, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant.  Write soon and tell me how the cherry trees are faring.

Well, it's been almost 14 years, and I guess the "polymorph" turned out to be the iPad I wrote all of this on.