TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY

In 1971 I saw my first digital watch.  It was a big clunky thing, but it was also amazing.  No hands, purely digital numbers.  It was a really cool watch.
Hey

In addition to displaying the time digitally, the watch also could tell you the date.  The date for crying out loud…how cool was that?  But wait, there’s more.  This watch also had a function that turned it into a stop watch.  A watch that could tell the time digitally, let you know what date it was, and also serve as a stop watch.  Before this watch you would need a regular watch for time, a calendar to know the date, and a separate very special stop watch to time events.                                         Frog

No wonder this fantastic watch cost over $300.

Feel

At the same time I saw this fantastic watch, someone showed me a small calculator which ran on batteries.  Not a big clunky adding machine that only added, but a calculator that added, subtracted, multiplied, divided and did other stuff that engineers used a slide ruler for (giyp).

                                                                                                                  BETTER

If this wasn’t enough, a few years later the local bar had a new machine.  It replaced a pin ball machine, and for twenty five cents you could challenge someone to a game of pong.  It was like ping pong; only you paddled an electronic pulse “ball” back and forth to your opponent. You could spin it and vary the speed that you paddled it.  It was really cool.  There was always a long line waiting to play this great new game. SOON

Don't

As if “Pong” was not enough several years later they came out with a new game, “Pac Man.”  You had to move a little mouth of a man through a maze gobbling up energy pills while dodging four ghosts.

Chase

All these new technological gadgets were so cool and they were being developed and improved so fast I remember commenting as a joke that, “The next thing you know, there will be a watch that not only tells time, date, and is also a stop watch, but it will also have a calculator function and can play Pac Man!”                                                     The

A year later, Casio sold a watch that did all that and more for $29.99.

In the 1980’s, I don’t believe anyone ever envisioned a small phone that was not only cordless, but was portable, told time, date, could act as a stop watch, a flash light, a camera, a video camera, could receive and send messages, would give directions to anywhere, play really cool games, and access virtually all the information available to mankind.

Nurses!

We did have really cool watches.