08 Apr 2009
Losing Sight of the Incredible

It occurs to me that we often lose sight of some truly incredible technologies. They get buried in the hurry and bluster of the workaday world, and we seem to forget that things have not always been as they are now.

A couple of weeks ago we found a deal at a local grocery on Oregon brand canned red raspberries. The kind in heavy syrup, used for tarts and pies. So Lorraine dug out the cookbooks and was looking up tart recipes, when I remembered an appliance that I had bought some twenty years ago, moved several times across several states and hardly ever (if ever) used. It was a Black & Decker Shell Maker, designed for making pastry shells! And sure enough, there it sat, still in our cupboard!

But without a manual. Or instructions of any sort. No visible temperature sensor or gauge. How do we use the damn thing?

Five minutes on Google later, and we had found a complete instruction manual, scanned in by a user and saved to PDF. And now we're working on raspberry tarts with more than just a vague idea of what we're doing...

Before the Internet, before Google, we would have had to tried to find an address or phone number for Black & Decker and either called or dropped them a note, requesting a replacement manual. They may or may not have had one, and even if they did may not have bothered sending it. Or they might have charged us for it.

But now we have it. Think about it. Twenty five pages of dense text from a booklet last published 18 years ago just popped out of a machine on my desk. At essentially no cost to me whatsoever. It seems so simple. But it's nothing short of incredible.

There are lots of other examples we all could come up with if we thought about it. If we took the time to notice. Maybe it's just my recent "news strike", or maybe it's an effect of my age, but I seem to be noticing things a lot more nowadays than I used to. And that, in my not so humble opinion, is a Good Thing™.

19:44 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link