Technology News and Review

Greetings and welcome to the Technology News and Review blog.  

I hope to highlight what I think is cool, or not so cool in the world of technology using plain, non-technical language with this blog.  Hopefully, with reader involvement, we can share our knowledge and help each other on this journey of discovery and understanding. You might now be asking yourself, “What qualifies this guy to moderate a technology blog?”  Ok, fair enough.

It all started when my father rolled that big, bulky, beautiful color TV into our home in Brooklyn.  It was 1966 and I was ten years old.  The TV was a Zenith console with a 24-inch screen that took over the entire corner of our living room.  You had to crank the fine-tuning and play with the aluminum-foil wrapped rabbit ears (these were early indoor antenna with two long metal telescoping rods that looked like -- you guessed it) for hours just to get a decent picture.  It was worth it because “Star Trek” and “Wonderful World of Disney” looked great.  I took a screwdriver to the back of that thing to gain access to its inner workings, and marveled at the way all those tubes (Tubes were used to amplify and modulate electronic signals, and had filaments that would glow like light bulbs) pulsed and dimmed while Spock and Captain Kirk jawed at each other.  It was magic.

Fast-forward four years.  We find my school friend and me trying to explain to his parents why the FCC was confiscating all our Ham Radio gear from his house.  Seems we had modified our gear to broadcast over AM radio frequencies, and that was a no-no.  It was a simple change of the main oscillator carrier frequency, but I digress.  We had radio WBBA (Brooklyn Bad Asses) taking requests (yes, we gave out the phone number -- pretty dumb) and playing “Black Sabbath, all day, all the time!!!” Seems we were also bleeding over a farm report station out on Long Island, and those farmers were pissed.  We lost our FCC Amateur Radio licenses (yes, we had them) and our equipment (all those neat tubes).  Our parents weren’t mad.  We were so smart.

Zoom ahead another five years.  I was tired of working in a supermarket (very low tech) and decided to join the U.S. Air Force.  They trained me to be an Avionics Radio and Radar Technician.  What a great job for a geek like me!!!  I got to travel AND play with technical stuff AND get paid too.  Tubes gave way to transistors and my soldering iron and I were there to see it.  I was able to branch out into other careers fields, and trained to be a Computer Specialist.  Things started to progress very quickly.  I learned programming languages like Fortran and COBOL (both dead today).  I was working on clunky teletype machines, big mainframes, and small workstations.  I helped build training systems using first generation microprocessors you’d probably find running your toaster today.  I ran a node of a specialized defense network that I can’t tell you anything about, except it was VERY high-tech.  All this time, I was a computer hobbyist.  I’ve owned a TRS-80 Model-One made by Radio Shack (a relic of the early home computer age), a Zenith Z-100 (a kit form of this machine was made by a company called Heath-Kit, now gone) and a few Gateways and Dells.

Leaping ahead another twenty years, with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in hand thanks to Uncle Sam, I went to work for EDS (Electronic Data Systems -- does anyone remember Ross Perot?).  I was back to programming in dead COBOL.  After 18 months, I left EDS to work at a State University in California as a Business Systems Programmer/Analyst.  I’ve been to lots of specialized training for this computer language or that, and they are all starting to look alike to me.  I finished coursework for my Master’s in Computer Science but got lazy and never completed my thesis.  I know, dumb.

So, ahead we go another ten years (if you’ve been paying attention, comment back on how old you think I am).  I still marvel at technology.  With every new product or advancement comes new ways to make our lives easier -- or crazier.  We’ve got entire music collections on wafer-thin plastic, phones just as thin with no wires and instant access to the entire world’s information with the flick of a key.  We are interconnected to everyone and everything.

I went to Circuit City the other day to buy a new TV.  It's not easy to choose a TV anymore.  There are so many things to consider.  Do you want DLP or LCD or LCoS (we'll talk about these soon)?  I pictured my dad, in that long ago TV store (probably Sears) pointing and saying "Gimme dat one."  Those days are long gone.  We need to study complex tecnical "white pages" before we walk into the store.... Let's study together.