Dry Slot

Generations (continued)

Posted by: Bogon, 02:40 GMT le 13 juin 2012

In 1951 I was born into a different world. It was the Atomic Age. During my first year of life the world's first H-bomb was detonated on Eniwetok. As a child the image of the mushroom cloud haunted my dreams.

The pace of technological evolution was increasing. It was also the Jet Age, which soon segued into the Space Age. Combine the Atomic Age with the Space Age and you get ballistic missiles, which meant that no place on earth was safe from prompt nuclear annihilation. Learned and authoritative men such as Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski reassured me that our international policy of Mutual Assured Destruction was working.

No wonder that one of my favorite movies is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb!

Then there were the wars. I might not have worried so much if the earth had been a peaceful place. There were endless World War II movies for impressionable young kids to watch. John Wayne could be counted on to shoot the Krauts or blow up the Japs. Or you could turn on the news and hear about the Korean War. At first there was only AM radio, but around the time I was old enough to start school Dad brought home the family's first black and white television. Soon after that we got a high fidelity FM stereo receiver/phonograph. These spiffy new electronic devices were built with vacuum tubes. They were massive furniture. (Mom still has the stereo. By now it's pretty much in the same category as Grandpa's Victrola.)

Back then we got two snowy channels on the teevee. Still, that was enough to enjoy the effect of video, which enhanced the immediacy of current events. By the time LBJ escalated the Vietnam War (guns and butter!), we could view the carnage in living color.

That was life during the Cold War. The main event was the ever-present nuclear Sword of Damocles, but there was always a hot brushfire burning somewhere in the background. We talked peace, prayed for peace, sang praises to peace and goodwill, but there was always a war. There still is. I have stopped worrying about the hypocrisy of that. What's a little hypocrisy compared to the threat of Armageddon?

* * *

The national news was no more encouraging. A series of charismatic and capable leaders and spokesmen got gunned down, erased: John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon. Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and John Belushi all dropped dead. I'm probably leaving somebody out here. These lists were compiled from my decreasingly reliable memory. Leave a comment, if you like.

Perhaps these people were too good for us here on planet earth. Perhaps we didn't deserve them. Perhaps we weren't ready yet to hear what they had to say. When will we be ready?

* * *

The news at a personal, local level is better. In a single lifetime my grandfather went from horse and buggy to jet plane. He lived to see NASA astronauts land on the moon.

By the time I started school, my father had earned his Ph.D. His formal education was complete. He spent the rest of his life giving back to education. When I graduated from high school, he was superintendent of schools here in Burlington. He held that job during the period of mandatory desegregation that followed the Supreme Court's decision Brown v. Board of Education. He managed to satisfy federal requirements to end segregation in the city school system, while keeping the schools functioning and maintaining peace in the community. I recall that he was subsequently invited to appear before members of Congress in Washington, DC, to explain how he did it. In numerous other locations around the country the same process did not end as well.

If I were to pick one thing to represent my father's legacy, that would be it. Thanks to people like him, black people in the South get a better deal today than they did in my grandfather's time. There's more work to be done, but a lot of progress has been made. Heck, a black man is President. It gratifies me to see bright, well-spoken people of color in my community, who look you square in the eye and smile when you say hello.

My sister-in-law has adopted a black child. She tells me that they get funny looks sometimes, when they go out together. I look forward to a time when skin color will be no more meaningful than the color of your eyes or hair. Perhaps, one of these days, such externalities will all be equally adjustable. In that world little green men would not necessarily be alien.

* * *

It is the Information Age. My first hands-on experience with computers came when I went to college in the early 1970s. Somewhere along the line I elected to take an introductory programming course. I discovered that I enjoyed learning programming languages. The logical thinking came naturally. I did not enjoy the process. At that time each line of code had to be punched into a paper card, the cards stacked into a deck, and the deck dropped into an In box to be queued to a card reader. Eventually your program would be allocated slices of processing time on the university's mainframe. The machine would generate fanfold output (usually just an error message, until you got the program debugged) on a line printer. The printout would be wrapped around your card deck with a rubber band and deposited in an Out box for pickup. Each iteration of this process took hours, and it was inherently error prone. I was not motivated to pursue this activity as a career.

Fifteen years later I bought my own personal computer. It was a miracle of microelectronics. The processing power of that desktop machine was comparable to the room-sized mainframe I had used at school. The difference was in the interface. The PC had a console. Feedback was immediate. Awesome!

At first my interest in personal computing was avocational. Playing with the machine was fun. I learned how to do stuff, how to make it go. This was back in the days of DOS. All I had was a command line, plus whatever commercial software I was willing to purchase on a hobbyist's budget. One of the most useful packages ever slotted into my floppy disk drive was called ProComm. With that and a 2400 baud modem I could go on-line. I could connect to bulletin boards, where I could download information and free software.

Gradually computing began to absorb more of my time and energy. Then I hit a mid-life crisis. I began to rethink everything, my whole setup. I floundered around for a while (years!), but the outcome was that I went back to school for a computer science degree. Since then I've had a tiger by the tail.

The rate of technological change in the field of computing outstrips anything I might have dreamed as I was growing up. The internet — who could have imagined the internet? (Well, William Gibson had a vision of the digital future in 1984. J. C. R. Licklider foresaw the possibilities way back in 1962. I reckon Lick wins the prize.) Now I'm talking to you across it. Pretty neat, huh?

Okay, I've probably talked long enough. Your ears are going to wear thin, and I'm liable to get hoarse. C U L8r!

Categories:Forecasting Howdy In Memorium

Updated: 03:00 GMT le 13 juin 2012

Permalink | A A A

View Comments (57)

Generations

Posted by: Bogon, 22:42 GMT le 05 juin 2012

In 1889 my grandfather was born into a different world. It was a world powered by horses and steam engines. It had been twenty years — one generation — since the opening of the transcontinental railroad. The United States was becoming a world leader in industry and innovation. Major technology companies that we might recognize by their acronyms today — American Telephone & Telegraph, General Electric, Standard Oil and Westinghouse — were also being born. Then, as now, unscrupulous businessmen made the news, drove the economy and manipulated politicians. It was the Gilded Age.

My grandfather was named after Grover Cleveland, who in 1884 became the first Democratic presidential candidate elected since before the American Civil War. The Democratic Party ruled the South. It was the party of resentment. Republican Abraham Lincoln had presided over the defeat of the southern states during the war. Generations of ex-Confederates could not forgive or forget.

For generations of American Blacks, the majority of whom lived in the South, the promise of emancipation went largely unfulfilled. The system was systematically rigged against them.

Grandpa grew up in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina. That part of the world was relatively unaffected by many of these events and issues. On the steep and remote mountain land there had been no plantations and therefore no slavery. There was little industrialization. As a young man my grandfather worked for one of the companies that logged timber throughout the region, until he had enough money to buy land of his own, and until the wholesale depredation of virgin forest prompted the formation of the National Forest Service.

Grandpa raised a family on his patch of ground. Through the Roaring Twenties and into the Great Depression he was able to eke out a living by being self-sufficient. For a while he operated a grist mill. He raised cattle, pigs and chickens. Grandma kept a garden. They had a spring for water, and they burned wood for fuel. They never had much cash, so the ups and downs of the external economy didn't make much difference.

In 1921 my father was born into a different world, a world rattled and rearranged by war. It had been exactly a century since the advent of mass production using interchangeable parts, a process adopted by Ransom Olds and Henry Ford for the manufacture of automobiles. At Ford's plant in Detroit a new Model T rolled off the line every fifteen minutes. It was the second year of Prohibition. Then, as now, supporters of the Republican Party believed that they could legislate morality. Some of Dad's tales mentioned moonshine, usually with a smile. :o)

Prohibition was repealed by the time Dad was a teenager. Betty Boop's implied promise of legalized beer became a reality. We still live with Prohibition's legacy, however, in the form of organized crime and the so-called "War on Drugs". It's still a game of Baptists and Bootleggers.

One of the significant differences in Dad's world was his opportunity for education. Dad attended a little neighborhood schoolhouse, the land for which had been carved out of one end of Grandpa's farm. The school was painted white, and it had a bell tower almost like a church. I'm old enough to have seen the (disused and ruined) building before it was torn down. It wasn't the stereotypical one-room schoolhouse; it had two or three.

As Dad described those days, there was a great deal of community support for education. His parents and teachers told him that, if he ever hoped to "amount to something", he needed to do well in school. So he did.

By the time he was ready for secondary school, there was a school bus to take him there. The high school was in the town of Mars Hill. There also was Mars Hill College, the logical next step. The small college offered a two-year program, after which Dad moved on to Western Carolina Teachers College (now a state university) in Cullowhee. Grandpa couldn't supply much in the way of funding, but Dad made up for that with motivation. He worked his way to a college degree, the first ever awarded to a native of his rural mountain hollow.

The next major development in Dad's life was set in motion by a contemporary of my grandfather, a fellow named Adolf Hitler. World War II was a big deal for my parents' generation. The economy had rebounded from the Depression, but now there was rationing. Everybody was enjoined to support the war effort. Eventually Dad chose to volunteer in the Army Air Force rather than take a chance on the draft board. He never tired of telling "war stories". I'd like to explain about all his heroic actions as a bomber pilot, but that's not how it worked out. The Air Force shipped Dad all over the country for training. As the war progressed and the needs of the service changed, as new technology was developed and better planes deployed, Dad's assignment kept changing, and they would ship him to another unit. Dad never fired a shot. The war ended before he ever got there. One of his last duties as a cadet was to ferry a brand new shiny B-32 to its ultimate destination... for demolition. When he told that story, he would always look down and sadly shake his head.

Following the war many returning veterans got married and started families. Millions of babies were born within a few years. All those babies made a big bulge on the demographic chart, rather like the bulge a rabbit makes after being devoured by a boa constrictor. That bulge was called the Baby Boom. That's where I come in.