While walking the beach at the moment of the low tide the idea of the digital native emerge. A boy maybe 5 years of age, clearly born to this age. Am I simply a digital immigrant born as computer emerged as massive tabulating machines. Paper tape and punch cards I remember loading into computers as I fit learned how easy it was to cause a computer to go into an endless loop.
Communications and the protocols designed to assure the delivery of binary data. Keyboards, printers and screenc capable of inputting and outputting letters and number we these living creates could comprehend. Cable and sound waves allowed us to transfer these streams of commands and information across what was to become to information highway we now call the Internet. Our imagination was limited by speed of the technology until we harnessed light and shot it down a fiber cable capable of traversing great oceans and deep under our city streets. Far off lands and ships floating on the ocean surface could be reached with radio waves bounced off of satellite high above our heads.
People who came before us struggle to appreciate what how technology has reshaped the world. They knew of telegraph and the telephone and probably remember speaking to an operator to make a connection. For them to grasp the ability to actually use a watch similar to what Dick Tracy used is science fiction made real. Their children, my generation, grew up with the television and as a teenager watch Neal Armstrong walk on the moon. We grew up worrying about termo nuclear disaster whereas our parents grew up being told of the great war when men spent years hunker down in trenches and dieing on battle field in the tens of thousands. They came age as we learned how to harness the atom and decimate cities with a single bomb blast.