Thursday, November 13, 2008

I feel grown up...

I feel like I am really grown up, because I was born before the 1990s and can remember life before Clinton was president (unlike most or any of Benjamin's students) and I remember the debate about beta and VHS, but every once in a while I find something that makes me feel really young. For instance, I am reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, and at the moment he is talking about the adoption of bar codes and the UPC - it didn't happen universally until the mid-late 1980s. I can't imagine shopping without bar codes. Yikes. I guess it makes sense that they wouldn't be seen as a time saver until computers were widespread, but then, I can't really remember life without a computer. Since my dad is a computer programer, and has been since the late 1960s, computers have always been in my consiousness. What will my (hypothetical, future) children use as time and memory markers?

No comments: