Technologically speaking

I’ve always been under the assumption that I grew up smack in the middle of what I call the “great transition into technology.” I experienced the dot.com boom, Y2K, the transition from dot matrix printers to ink jet and laser printers. I can remember back to when I was 7 years old playing on my dad’s computer, which featured a very basic MS-DOS menu. We actually used 5 ¼” floppy disks to store data back then.
I can also distinctly remember our Media Specialist in 8th grade showing off her brand new CD-Rom as if she’d discovered an amazing secret. In middle school we took keyboarding/typewriting classes, but in high school these became Computer Applications courses. It was also during my high school years that most teachers began requiring typed research papers as opposed to handwritten ones. It was around the same time that we were allowed to start using Web sites as sources for our assignments. Even the technology behind overhead projectors changed while I was in school. The memory of all this is unshakeable. Jump forward and the world we now live in is based around virtual reality and online social networking.
So it came as quite a shock to find out that another generation could have possibly experienced as big of changes as I had, technologically speaking. I was talking to my AFLAC representative yesterday, a woman who told me she recently celebrated her 70th birthday. We were mutually bashing the undependable nature of the office copying machine and other such pieces of equipment when she said, “Well, I can remember being in grammar school and we didn’t have copying machines back then. I was the teacher’s pet and my teacher would always select me to be the student who got to bring home with me a copy of the next day’s assignment. I would place it against a light-filled window and trace by hand copies of the assignment for each of the other students.” She spoke with such pride as she described what I would consider an abysmal assignment.
I just found it astonishing to think about the changes she has seen in her lifetime. And it serves as a reminder that while I feel overwhelmed at times by oh so many new options, I cannot imagine how older generations must feel. I will surely be able to provide my own children with a good laugh when I one day tell them that I used to store files on something the size of their heads. They’ll whip out their inevitably invisible thumb drives and gawk in my face.