A Digital Christmas

Don't tell her, but one of the things I'm getting my wife for Christmas is an MP3 player. For $50 she'll have a device that will store and play approximately 1200 songs.  Following 78, 45. and 33 RPM vinyl (those were the days, heh), 8 track (skipped these), cassette tapes (spaghetti like), and CDs (get them mixed up with DVDs all the time), we're moving ahead for better or worse.  If I left some technologies out, all I can say is, it hasn't always been easy staying current.  Just as I'm reading the directions for the MP3 player, my favorite son called to ask my opinion on how his mother would like a Kindle for Christmas.  I see a holiday theme developing.   

What's remarkable is the digital bang for the buck you get these days.  In 1975, my favorite brother-in-law stops by waving this gizmo called a hand-held calculator.  It was a basic four function Panasonic and he was delighted to pay $100 for the thing.  A few years later I had the privilege of working with Dr Robert Miller, a Harvard educated statistician.  He showed me a Boston newspaper story recounting how he and his son were one of the first to have a computer in their home.  I believe the computer was a PDP 8.  In any event, Dr Miller paid $10,000 for the thing.  He programmed this dinosaur in the FORTH computer language using paper tape.  My little MP3 player has thousands of times the storage capacity of his old beast.  Incidentally, everyone assumed Dr Miller's primary reason for buying the computer was to make advances in weather prediction, but he confided in me he was looking for an edge when playing the ponies.  He was a wonderful guy.

Many items have risen in price over the years.  I recall gasoline at 17 cents per gallon, a new car for $1700, and a new house for $9000.  But thanks to technology, price decreases are also common.  Technology has had a huge effect on how we live, work, relax, and move about.  In this remarkable video, Hans Rosling associates the rise in living standards throughout the world with income levels.  Technology is the key to these changes.