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An Info Pro Explains How Alvin Tofer Got It Right
If the last 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last 70 lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another-as writing made it passible to da. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of man ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precisian. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we used in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th lifetime. -Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock (1970)
When Alvin Toffler published his breakthrough book Future Shock, I was seven years old and had a predilection for peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches. The nuts in the peanut butter usually got stuck in my teeth and maybe that's why I wouldn't use a computer for 16 years. "But wait," you might be thinking, "I remember that wild Apple Macintosh commercial that debuted during the 1984 Super Bowl, which would only be 14 years later-where the heck were you for two years?" I must have been distracted by the Super Bowl special five-layer taco dip because a Mac didn't show up in my office until circa 1986, and I remember my college buddies and me circling it like sharks around a hapless fluffernutter sandwich.
The truth is, we really didn't know what to make of the box with the wee screen-only nine inches if you recall. Sure, we remembered that computer lab somewhere off in the bowels of our high school and college basements, but those were another planet really. There was a feeling of total mystery about what exactly this box was and what it did.
We couldn't even begin to know what to do with the mouse-the mouse that revolutionized everything because it gave you the ability to browse around and figure things out. In other words, you didn't have to already know computer programming, which was pretty arcane stuff. Even so, we...