Rachel gets an iPhone
by Rachel Creager Ireland
I tried explaining to my eight-year-old and her five-year-old sister that if you could magically transport eight-year-old me to today, and hand me this sleek thing with no buttons (or dial) and tell me it would be my personal telephone, that I would carry it everywhere I went, and it would enable me to talk to anyone, anywhere, and also to access all the information in the world (before we had a name for the Internet, before anyone knew it existed), just how unbelievably science fiction it would be. It would be this fantastic thing from the future, it would be Star Trek (which they don’t know about). It would be . . . like Magic Tree House.
I tell them sometimes how excited my Dad, the physicist, was, to have a pocket calculator. No, you couldn’t text people, you couldn’t take pictures, it didn’t have any games. You could do math with it, and that was exciting, because before that he used slide rules. It truly wasn’t that long ago, I’m truly not that old.
Please notice and appreciate the incredible revolution we are living in. We’ll save for another time discussions of rare earth elements and geopolitics, the environment, privacy invasion, identity theft, and child safety. Just think for a minute about how radically different life was for ordinary people twenty or thirty years ago (if you can remember that far back).
That is all. Thank you.
I like the way you think. Many years ago when I was maybe 6, in about 1955, my dad came home from a trip and told a most unusual story. He had been in a gas station in a big city. In there was a vending machine that sold sandwiches. Near it was a kind of oven…different looking, he said, didn’t have any kind of heating element, he said. My dad said you could heat your sandwich in that oven in about a minute, and you didn’t have to take the plastic wrapper off of it!
Now my mother and I were pretty sure that my dad had surely lost his mind, cos everybody knew you couldn’t put a plastic wrapper in an oven, or heat a sandwich in one minute. But dad insisted it was true………..
I’m 64, and find it so hard to believe the technology of our life today compared to when I was a child.
Wow! I didn’t know they had microwaves that early. I remember in the 70s they were getting inexpensive enough that regular people could buy them, but they were still kind of a big deal.
Yes, I remember about that strange oven as a child and it wasn’t till the 70′s that we ever had them available for homes, and even then they were expensive, and huge! I guess cos he was in a big city, things were more advanced there.
For the young ones, we could talk about design . . . like the big silver buttons they had . . .