Posted by Jim Mohr

 

Technology in the Last Twenty-five Years

I can not believe how fast technology is growing. Technology has changed our lives in the last twenty-five short years, in ways that are both evident and not so evident. Evident are the advances in technology in communication, media, banking, cooking our meals, and personal computers. Not so evident are the advances in technology, in the fields of medicine, transportation, and science itself.

Twenty-five years ago, cordless telephones were next to nonexistent. If you received a phone call, you were tied up to a corded phone and were only free to walk about, the length of the cord itself. Cordless phones solved this problem to an extent by freeing up the person to be able to move about in a lot greater range. Then came cell phones, today cell phones are everywhere; a cell phone range is endless. Everywhere people are talking on cell phones. Cell phones have really changed the way we communicate with each other.

Now days it is impossible to buy a television that isn’t remote controlled, color, stereo, and game ready. Also there are flat screen, large screen, and plasma televisions to name a few. If you are afraid you might miss your favorite television show, just program the video cassette recorder to record the program for you. Want to see a movie but do not like going to the theater, just wait a few weeks and rent the movie in D.V.D. or V.H.S. format and watch in the comfort of your own home.

Tired of your old eight track tapes, cassettes, or vinyl albums, now you can listen to your favorite music on digitally perfect compact disks. Compact disks, C.Ds. as they are known, are only a fraction of the size of a vinyl album but sound so much better no scratches or skips.

When you pull up to a gas station to fill up your car, no one comes out to help you. Instead you just insert your credit card or A.T.M. card into a gas pump that plays music, pump the gas, then out pops a receipt. In some of the larger retailers, you can even check out your own merchandise, with auto checkers and then pay for it with your credit card, or A.T.M. card. A.T.M. cards are great, now we have twenty-four hour, seven days a week banking, almost doing away with the old cliché banker’s hours.

Cooking has also changed these last twenty-five years, due to microwave ovens. Items can be thawed out in minutes instead of hours. Actually, entire meals can be cooked in minutes instead of hours, thanks to the microwave oven. The ability of the microwave oven is dependent on the imagination of the person using it.

Now almost every home has a personal computer, which with only the click of the mouse can be used to surf the World Wide Web, pay bills, send or receive e-mail, and even play games on. Personal computers are also used to keep us up to date with news, weather, sports, and stock quotes. The list of what can be done with a personal computer is too huge to list now.

The list is almost endless of the advances in technology in the last twenty-five years. These are only a few examples of what we see first-hand. Even more technology has advanced in the back ground that we do not see, such as in medicine, science, and transportation to list only a few. It is going to be very exciting to see where technology takes us to in the next twenty-five years.

 

 

 

 

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