Acquaintance of The Blaugh, dotHTM, recently posted responses to a blog-tagging thing and was looking for people to tag in return. I've been looking for reasons to write in long-form again lately (that aren't just me ranting about The State Of Things again), so I volunteered myself for it.
And let's be honest - I should also be getting more used to the workflow of posting new things to this page. Zonelets/zoneRSS is a bit Different.
When did you first get interested in technology?
My birth largely coincided with the IBM PC market going Absolutely Crazy, and I had the very good fortune to have both parents working in tech (to some extent), with one working in the fab at Intel, and the other doing... something?... at Tektronix. We may not have been a very rich family, but that left us in a fairly well-to-do position to have Computers in the house.
My older sibling and I spent our childhood largely immersed in the world of computing. The machine we used was some form of IBM XT clone, a hand-me-down from Dad who had just upgraded to an entry-level 386 with an actual hard drive. Dad was always looking for cool new things to do with these things, and had shelves and shelves full of floppy disks of both major sizes. My sibling, always the one seeking trouble and dragging me into it, had decided to start searching through them one day to see about finding us some new games to play that we hadn't tried before. Well, one of those disks turned out to have a virus on it, which the both of us had unwittingly spread through a large chunk of his library. Oooops!
What’s your favorite piece of technology of all-time?
Optical media, and writable at that. I mean, I grew up at exactly the right time to witness the CD-ROM Revolution take hold in the MS-DOS era, the first time I ever believed that, now, there we no more limits. Games that talked. Movies and TV that we could watch without ever having to rewind a tape. A wide world of musical genres that I otherwise probably would never have heard, what with my dad being a big Deadhead and my mom gravitating more towards 80s pop and Tangerine Dream. The Sibling and I would play a game, realize it had CD Audio on it, then later pop it into the stereo to listen to it apart from the game. MechWarrior 2 and Descent 2 were almost more often in the CD player than in the computer. (A PC version of Jet Moto, bundled with a 3Dfx Voodoo card, that we never once got to run correctly, practically stayed in the CD-changer until the Sibling moved out and took it with them.)
Of course the real CD Revolution was when burners became cheap enough to put into every computer. By the time I had graduated high school, my own computer had one; I was burning backups of so much stuff that I still have in binders to this day (and yes, still backed up to multiple places). Games, utilities, MOD files (oh yeah, tracker music is one of my favorite things, too!), tons of conversions and add-ons for Quake 2 and Half-Life, eventually even PlayStation games I'd found "lying around" and crunched into RAR files as heavily as I could manage, just to fit more than one on a CD-R at once.
But the burns I'm the most proud of? To the point that I have a whole CD-wallet dedicated to them? The Weasel's Mix collection. The first of those was a cassette tape, recorded using my sibling's cheap bookshelf-stereo hooked up to their rescued-from-a-dumpster Packard Bell Pentium-166. We had figured out how to bridge a Sound Blaster 16's line-out jack to the RCA "aux" inputs on the back, which meant I could now tape-record anything that a sound card could output. Which, of course, meant a lot of tracker music, playing out a copy of Impulse Tracker because it was the only thing that ran tolerably on it. But Weasel's Mix II? That was the first burned disc of the series. The selections were just as eclectic - tracker songs lazily converted to MP3 using ModPlug Tracker, coupled with one or two commercial songs by actual bands that didn't fit the vibe at all, capped off with "Another World of Beasts" from Final Fantasy VI. ...I'd get better at making mixes eventually. It just took me a few more volumes.
What question was I answering again? Oh, right, favorite piece of technology. Like, here is my point: when the CD-ROM was first introduced to the world, it seemed untouchable, special, available only to a certain elite. A drive to even read the things was expensive enough, but one single disc held more data than the largest consumer hard disk drives of the time, and forget about making them yourself. The CD-R drive? That's what truly made Data CDs available to the masses. I recall a saying, associated with Colt revolvers in the American West: "God created Man, Samuel Colt made him equal." Well, from my perspective, the CD-R stands as the polar opposite of the Colt Single-Action Army. One is a tool designed to destroy. The other is a tool designed to create. Both would be made available to the masses, in such a way that Anybody could access one (up to a point). And to use one requires not much more than a Click.
Maybe a touch morbid, but if I could leverage this thought into selling "CD-Rs, not bullets!" T-shirts, I would think it'd be a big hit, in like... 2002.
What’s your favorite piece of technology right now?
I get an awful lot of use out of the camera on my phone. I don't really take pictures of people, let alone myself; I like to photograph scenes and objects. As soon as I'd figured out how to hook up a Dropbox account (and have my pictures automatically sync to my computers), I got to taking way, way more such photos. Neat sunset? Take a photo. Going somewhere? Take a photo out the window. Cool-looking building? Take a photo. At the thrift store and see something funny? Take a photo.
Photos used to be a big spectacle, requiring so much set-up and potential wastage if the shot went wrong for any reason. Flash didn't fire, or someone's eyes were shut, or the kids won't sit still, or you had a better idea for a pose. Digital cameras eliminated that factor of waste, and putting them into the device that I'm carrying in my pocket anyway made it so accessible as to be usable on a whim.
I keep seeing other folks posting in tags like #ShittyCameraChallenge - I do actually own a Sony Mavica FD-73 (I think?), but the floppy drive on it won't read. I think it just needs the head cleaned, but that's going to involve dismantling the whole thing, and I just haven't been in the mood to do that yet. Some day. Maybe.
Name one new cool piece of technology we’ll have in 25 years!
Ehhhhh I'm probably not the one to speculate positively about where Tech is going, because if I'm too brutally honest, I'd say Tech is one of the bigger sources of the problems we're having recently. Well, maybe not the technology itself, but the profiteering off of it. But of course, you can't develop new technology without money being involved. Once that ceases to be a problem, though, that's where we're likely to see another tech boom like we did through the 90s.
The thing I'd be the most excited about happening over the next 25 years, though? 3D printers have been getting really good lately. Just ten years ago, the things were slow, less than practical, not cheap, somewhat fragile. They're getting faster and more detailed recently, but what I'd be the most excited about would be us developing some direct recycling-to-printing pipeline that can live in (or around) the home. I'm aware of neat tricks like unraveling plastic 2-liter bottles to feed into the system as filaments, but I think it'd be even more awesome if ordinary people could easily recycle almost any used materials in that way.
I'm thinking about those video channels where people melt down aluminum soda cans to cast into swords, or turn fallen trees into chairs, or turn dirt into knives. I think it would be awesome if we had some way to refine or carbonize random cast-offs into something we could feed into the 3D printer. Plastic food wrappers? Styrofoam trays? Melt 'em down, print 'em into something useful again. The next great creative revolution will come when we no longer worry about expending resources to create. (Because, really, they want how much for a roll of good filament?)
Further thoughts and passing the tag along
Going over my answers to these questions has me realizing once again that the human race was meant to create. We observe what surrounds us, and we ponder, "What if I put this thing together with this other thing?" And that, really, is the basis of so much of our growth as a species. We learn, so that we can create, and as we create, we teach others to create as well, improving our methods and our materials.
But - and there's always a "but" - now, in 2025, Creating is seemingly locked for those who have neither the time nor the resources with which to Create. If we are to ever make progress again, those resources need to be available to us again. People need to be given those resources again, by the people who have been hoarding them. Yes, this is me going anti-capitalist. Because far too often I've had all of my idle thoughts ending with, "it's a shame I don't have the money for that."
I said this wasn't going to just be me ranting about the State of Things. Well, that's where it ended up anyway. Sorry about that.
I suppose, though, that I should pass the tag along to somebody. I don't know a whole ton of people these days that Blog, but you know what, I'll see if some people are interested. I can't just keep this post in my buffer forever though (no drafts unless I save it to a text file) so if someone does agree to it, I'll see if I can edit the post or something.