July 28, 2006
Time and Technology and Groceries Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Fred Schwarz the other day noted that technology develops in fits and starts, and that is surely true, especially if measured by technology that affects everyday life. He also noted that there had been a hiatus for four decades in apparent major technological change from the introduction of television (effectively late forties) to the late eighties, when the personal computer began to enter American households in large numbers.
I can bear witness to this, being about as young as an American can be and still remember the very first time I saw television (it was late in 1949 and the program featured good guys in white hats chasing bad guys in black hats across a desert landscape, doubtless located close to Los Angeles). I can also remember, circa 1952, pointing out to a friend that the Oldsmobile parked on east 82nd Street in New York that belonged to my aunt’s brother had, mirabile dictu, only two foot pedals because it had an “automatic” shift. The switch from dial phones to push-button models came along about 20 years later. But those are relatively small potatoes.
Of course, much was going on below the surface. The first TVs used vacuum tubes. The transistor soon made them cheaper, smaller, and much more trouble-free (TV repairmen used to do a brisk business coming to people’s houses and fixing whatever ailed the set, usually a blown tube; today that occupation is as dead as the iceman). In 1969 the microprocessor once again radically reorganized and miniaturized the insides of television sets and other electronic devices.
Then, as the microprocessor got ever smaller and cheaper and more densely populated with transistors (in other words, as Moore’s Law worked its inevitable way), they started showing up in more and more applications that affected everyday life, beginning with the handheld calculator that sent the slide rule to the Smithsonian beginning about 1972. (And good riddance to it. I never could get the hang of a slide rule.)
Then for the last 20 years there has been an incredible flood of everyday technologies undreamed of when the push-button phone was the newest wonder of the world: CDs, cordless phones, cell phones, GPS systems in everything from automobiles to dog collars, DVDs, satellite TV, TIVO (imagine telling someone who died in, say, 1970, that you can pause live TV when your mother-in-law calls and wants to tell you, at great length, her latest adventures).
Today I was introduced to the newest child of the microprocessor and fell instantly in love with it: the Shopping Buddy. It’s about the size of a book and fits into a shelf on the handle of a supermarket shopping cart. You scan in your store card and then scan items as you add them to your cart. It keeps a running total of how much you have spent and, because it’s hooked up to a GPS system, tells you about specials in each aisle as you enter it, and other useful information. You can even send in your shopping list ahead of time and it will remind you of what’s on it as you pass the right sections.
When you’re done, you just go to the automatic checkout counter, scan in your card again, transfer the information from the Shopping Buddy to the main computer—you push one button to do that—it debits your bank account, you load up, and off you go.
For someone who can remember grocery stores where the grocer, while you stood at the counter, went and got the items for you (using a gizmo on a long stick to reach things on high shelves), it is truly a new age.
|
