Disruptive Technologies

We bought a home a year ago and are still moving in. Still wading through the boxes. But every box we open and deal with is its own little triumph Many recent boxes have me thinking about how disruptive technology is.

I've been in this game for years. My first wife managed a RadioShack store when the TRS80 was big news. I had a friend who built his own computer from HeathKit.

As a mainframe computer operator, I used to chat with kids in Europe over a precursor to the modern internet. We'd discuss politics, movies and Formula One autoracing. We sent e-mail to one another. We joined lists of like-minded fans of various movies, computers and technologies. I was on one for Macintosh programmers, for a while. Every day I'd get a digest of all the tips and troubles people had discovered, all over the world, learning to program Macs.

I wanted two things out of owning a computer: I wanted to hook up with people who were earning a living writing, and I wanted access to stock market information. I had no idea what I was looking for, in particular. I just knew if I could download a years' worth of trading data, it might be useful, somehow, in predicting what prices would be tomorrow. The GEnie Writers' RoundTable turned out to be far more valuable, leading to a freelance writing career that spanned almost fifteen years, and an online career that spanned more than a dozen.

I don't remember my first electronic mail. I'm pretty sure it was at HDR in Omaha, running a Control Data CYBER 170. I do remember thinking it was pretty cool, though. Press a button here and *Whoosh!* your thoughts spilled out on someone else's screen a mile or more away. Flash ahead thirty years and the post office is running all kinds of modeling simulations that all point to closing post offices, restricting mail delivery to only part of the week, or both.

I found an old tax return, last week. I'd paid seventeen dollars to have it prepared. Then, somewhere along the way, I started doing it myself on my Macintosh. I prepared and filed our taxes every year for years, until we bought this house. I have copies of all of those returns printed out and sleeping in file cabinets somewhere. I also have copies on floppy disks I cannot read. I don't have a computer that uses 3½″ floppies any more. My tax program, MacInTax, was sold to Intuit somewhere in the middle, there. I switched to Windows computers for a while, and TurboTax, then switched back to the H&R Block program because I was mad at Intuit by then. I can't read any of them, now. And I don't know anyone who could help with that, either.

I have fabulous boxes perfectly designed to store 3½″ floppies, and CD-ROMs, too. Interlocking, heavy-duty plastic drawers and really nice little wooden rolltop boxes. I mean I had a ton of these, back in the day, and apparently I thought this was how we would keep and store data forever, or something.

I have boxes of incredibly complex hardware. How do you hook up a Macintosh printer to a Windows computer, or vice-versa? I've got a pig-tail, somewhere, I'm sure, with the right plug at both ends. Some of these come with stories.

I have nothing to connect these to. I have no hardware that requires or even accepts SCSI, now. I have dozens of cables to hook up alternatives to travel Macs in the era before the Macintosh Portable shipped. I bought a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop and Microsoft Works, as close as I could get to the Macintosh experience. I had a terrific translation program I did a review on (and kept) that would translate between five or six MS-DOS and Windows programs and four or five Mac versions of word processors, spreadsheets and several other formats. Now it's just spaghetti. Colored wires in a box. Lots of colored wires in lots of boxes.

I remember thinking when I bought most of them that this would be the last thing I would need, for a while. As if I actually thought I was through spending technodollars.

Well, before the Next Big Thing arrives, I need to throw this (now) crap away and get the boxes out of my life. Right now, I need the room more than I need the stories and the wires.