Tonight I was at OfficeMax, buying some back to school supplies with my daughters. I was surprised to see that there is still a typewriter section at the store. There are actually two models to choose from.
This is going to sound like an “old man” story, but when I started practicing law 30 years ago, the firm of 45 lawyers had no computers. Every secretary worked 0n an electric typewriter. Even in 1990, when I brought my own computer to my law firm, people were wondering why an attorney would have a computer. Now I work at a firm with 14 attorneys, and every attorney has a computer–there is one typewriter (for forms and labels). It makes you wonder, at this rate of change, whether anyone has the ability to predict how the world will look in ten more years.
Predicting the future is a slippery business. Authors like Asimov and Clark have remarked on it. I like to read old speculative fiction (a.k.a. Science Fiction) to see what they got right and what they got wrong. Technologies based on random advances can never be predicted.
That the Department of Defense would have created a hardened network to allow free communication between anywhere and anywhere using a variety of backbones, that would combine with a new application of mathematics allowing images to be seriously compressed, resulting in the World Wide Web stretches the bounds of imagination.
Add in the imaginative idea of sharing radio frequencies among millions of unrelated transmitters by creating cells of very local communication range, all cells linked by a system of converting analog to digital to optical signals that travel through glass so pure that light can shine for hundreds of miles, even around many curves. And then finally these messages are viewed via hand held devices containing billions of switches and memory cells so cheaply available that every person in a nation can almost simultaneously discover and share latest lolcat.
Now that’s unbelievable. No one could make that up.