Quick advance until December 9, 2024 when I entered the Apple Store in Madison to buy another new Apple computer – the only computer brand I have ever possessed. There are so many items in the store that we could never have imagined 60 years ago. There were laptops, office computers, iPads, iphones, watches, storage devices and much more. This surprised me that there were no cash registers visible in the building. Employees use their iPhones when they need goods brought from the back room. They also use their phones to accept credit card payments. No signature is necessary; Everything is fast and the customer comes out. The receipt is sent by e-mail to the address they have in the file for the customer.
After bringing my computer home, I decided to wait until the next day to install everything. The technician told me that it would be easy to transfer my old computer information to the new computer; It could take four hours. I went to YouTube to see how to transfer; I also read the instructions that have been given with the new computer. However, that didn’t work for me; I called their number at no cost and reached a Mississippi technician. She was able to help me get things done. The instructions did not tell me that I had to prepare my old computer to transfer the data. By explaining to the technical advisor what was on each of my screens, she did not understand what I described. I told him that I had an iPhone and that I could take pictures of the screens and text. She asked if everything would be good if she would connect to my screen so that she could see what my iPhone had seen. It took a few seconds before being able to configure my old computer to transfer the data.
When the time has come to transfer the data. I pushed the necessary buttons and ended the phone call. As I knew it was going to “take a minute”, as the Mississippi technician said, I decided to walk in Walgreens. As I got home, 25 minutes later, more than 100,000 documents, photographs and other digital images scanned from decades of newspapers had all been transferred.
Thanks to a friend who had sent me an email about my columns, I remembered another capacity of the computer that I did not use. He mentioned that his message had been dictated by him to the computer. This is a technique that I started to use to write parts of these columns. It could help me turn off the columns more frequently, but it is not a promise!
For this old man, who as a boy walked or bike at the country school of a room for eight years, it is quite difficult to realize how things have changed in less than 60 years. I first taught computer programming in an Indiana secondary school in 1974 using maps in cards and a large central computer, which was in another building. We cannot imagine how much things will change over the next 20 or 50 years, because we could not imagine today’s technology in the 1960s.
– Matt Figi is a resident of Monroe and a local historian. His chronicle will appear periodically on Saturday in Times. It can be contacted at mfigi48@tds.net or at 608-325-6503.