My recent office space exploration highlighted to me the great extent to which technology has changed my work. I don’t say this as a forty-something-year-old trying to come to grips with newfangled mobile devices, but rather as someone who has been an early/active user of technology, so the change has been so incremental that I never really recognized the full scope of it.
I first learned computer programming about 30 years ago: FORTRAN on punch (aka Hollerith) cards via mainframes, then BASIC on audio cassettes via TRS-80 computers, then BASIC on 8″ floppies via TRS-80 III computers (official motto: “Now with 64k RAM!”). I wrote my own stock market game in BASIC, as well as a program to schedule altar boys for Sunday services at my church.
In college, I was one of a handful of advanced students in a finance/investments course who learned how to analyze and plot data using Lotus 1-2-3, and then for two summers I worked nightshift (6pm-2am) computer operations mostly making backups of an IBM System/34 mainframe with magazines holding ten 8″ floppies (and teaching myself the fundamentals of RPG-II and COBOL).
In my career at a Chicago bank, I helped design and debug PC-based software in the pre-Windows era for electronic money movement of all kinds, using a desktop Compaq Portable II (26lbs, 10MB harddrive) in the office or a Toshiba T5100 laptop (15lbs, no battery) for the road; for demonstrations on marketing/sales calls, we used ‘the coffin,’ as we called the huge/heavy projecter that was then state-of-the-art. I also had one management position in the very early 1990s that involved beta-testing document scanning/storage as well as telephony that would call up the customer’s record on the screen of the service agent receiving the call. In one way or another, most of my professional career was built around different ways to electronically exchange information and value, eliminating the need for paper documents and manual processing.
After moving away from developing business applications using computer technology, I did maintain a bit of my geekiness — I prefer PCs because I can play around with the hardward/software guts of them, I use keyboard combinations in programs instead of the mouse, and I’ve been a big fan of freeware like Eudora, Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc…for example, I had a Windows 98 machine at home when I bought my first iPod, which forced me to install USB ports and then when iTunes wouldn’t work to find/download a freeware driver patch that would let me use the iPod via the PC. I have always been careful and frugal about my technology purchases, and have had one PC or another at home for about 20 years now. My first cell phone was one of those ‘bag phones,’ which we bought one summer because my wife was driving four hours to visit me on the weekends while I did language study at another university. My current phone is pretty old technology, but it’s prepaid and costs me very little every month. I have set up and maintained my own websites for over ten years now, not to mention this blog and other social networking applications. My current laptop is 2GB dual core, weighs 5.5lbs including the battery, and has been tweaked every which way possible.
So, it’s not like this stuff just showed up on my doorstep like a package from the Unabomber.
Thinking now of my present office and out-of-office needs, it is amazing what we can do now. Between my current laptop, thumbdrives, scanning, and electronic documents, I don’t need to maintain a giant library of books or file cabinets of documents. Heck, for that matter, with mobile devices like the Palm Pre (which lets me manipulate documents/spreadsheets), ebook devices like Kindle (which can display PDFs), and client conference rooms with built-in projectors, I could practically leave the laptop at home and not miss a beat — I could keep my phone in my pocket and carry around a folder holding my Kindle and a thumbdrive, in the US or even internationally.
How’s THAT for change over the last 30 years?!
