At lunch time we left home for a quick trip to Margaret's mother's place in Newcastle. During the first part of the trip (while Margaret was driving) I prepared my sermon for Sunday on my lap-top. I finished as we arrived in Quirindi, so I plugged in my wireless modem and emailed it to myself.
Having completed this convenient method of getting my document back to my home computer, I thought about how not so long ago the previous two sentences would have been meaningless.
When I started ministry in 1984, just a little over 25 years ago, there were no laptop computers- in fact the top personal computer was the Commodore 64. Email and the internet were an academic novelty, mobile phones were unknown and the concept of sending data over any kind of phone seemed like a science fiction concept.
While I was doing these things my mobile phone was serving as a GPS navigation device- communicating with space based transmitters to give me a constant indication of my location and a constantly updated calculation of the quickest route to my destination.
The advances in technology over the last quarter of a century are just amazing. We take many of these things for granted as we use them each day, but it is good sometimes to think back at how our lives are different.
When I was studying Chemical Engineering in the late 1970's one of my lecturers confidently told us at the beginning of our FORTRAN programming course, "You will probably never use this. Computers are so expensive that they will only ever be used for the finance sections of companies." Hmmm... now I am surrounded by computers in almost every room of my home and carry another one with me in the form of a smart phone.
How things change!
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