Enjoy This Time

I know enough about electronics that I can usually understand at least some aspects of the newer technologies...how they operate, the basic electronics behind the technologies, etc. I can usually read articles about some of the electronic technologies and make some sense of what they articles are trying to say.

I had electronics training way back in the 1960's, and held an FCC First Class Radiotelephone license for a number of years. My training included basic electronics, vacuum tubes as well as solid state devices, rudimentary computers and flip-flops, and commercial broadcast technology.

I say that to say that even though I know something of the technology behind things like cell phones, HDTV, modern computers, automobile computer systems, and communications, I have to say that I am regularly blown away by the advances in technology that I am seeing. Stuff that was not on anyone's radar “back when,” or even just a few years ago are now supporting relatively common-place technologies. Things no one could even have imagined some years ago are now everywhere. And I'm not just speaking of the explosion in cellular and computing systems, although that is part of it.

Back in the 1970''s, for example, I would have given my right arm for a mobile telephone. Working primarily from my car in Western Kansas, knowing where the public phones were was a necessity, and kept me from being as efficient as I would liked to have been. Now, everyone...EVERYONE...has a cell phone and can call anywhere in the world.

Another example is the advent of smart vehicles...automobiles that can sense where the vehicle is, other vehicles that are nearby, and where on the road a vehicle is. Such technologies send out a radio signal that reflects off of objects and comes back to the vehicle. The computer systems in the auto then use that information to make a decision on whether to steer, brake, warn, or whatever. Such signals are in frequency bands as high as 77gHz. That is 77 billion hertz, or cycles per second.

Not that many years ago, 10 gHz was about as high of a frequency as could be generated and used in any meaningful way. The radio frequency spectrum has been expanding upward by leaps and bounds in recent years, and I cannot fathom that progress in any meaningful sense.

There are other advances in electronics technology that just boggle my mind. We take for granted, for example, that we can email to the other side of the earth in a matter of seconds and receive a response in just a few more seconds. We have no comprehension of the incredible technologies and the equally incredible infrastructure behind those incredible technologies which make that possible.

Just regular cellular service involves an intricate and incredibly advanced technology that was not even comprehendable 40 or so years ago. Then look at the explosion of video, remote control, connectivity, entertainment systems, and all of the other, and an old electronics dinosaur like me just salivates and marvels, seeing things not even dreamed of en my earlier years.

Enjoy this time. Appreciate this time.