I'm sitting in one of my classes while pursuing an MA in Bioethics today and it suddenly struck me how things have changed so rapidly in the last 30 years. The main object of my wonder has to do with the technology we use and how incessantly connected we all are (and yes, I'm writing this while listening to the prof with one ear).
I was recently reminded by a high school classmate that we graduated 30 years ago. At that time, my high school was considered very progressive because we had classrooms full of Apple II+ and IBM PC computers. We were learning to write our own programs in BASIC and Pascal, but only a few classes had the privilege of using these machines as my sister--one year ahead of me in school--had to learn programming in FORTRAN using card readers.
Even when I entered into university and I started learning Ada, nothing had changed much as I still had to go to the computer lab, hope that there was a terminal available, make my adjustments to my code, and wait for the output to be printed.
My, how times have changed. In my current classroom, of the 18 students and the professor present, 17 of us have our laptops open and multitasking (some shopping, some on Facebook, one writing a blog, some taking notes). And considering most of us have smartphones (I know this to be true because most of us have them on the desks next to our laptops or plugged into an outlet being charged), we actually have two computers on each of us.
Surprisingly enough, the prof, because he's having a bad time with technology today, just mentioned how the university had only one computer when he was a student here 40 some odd years ago.
My, how times have changed.
