Caught Between Vinyl and the iPhone

As the Apostles of the New Technology push onward, those of us who remember 78 rpm records ("stacks of wax," disc jockeys liked to say), typewriters (now in the Smithsonian) and reel-to-reel tape recorders (some with wire, some with paper, which would inconveniently begin to burn in the middle of a program) feel strangely isolated, strangers in a strange land (thank you, Exodus and Robert Heinlein).

Some of us remember the arrival of television, 12-inch black-and-white screens in furniture store windows, curious passersby pressing their noses to the glass.  Some of us are trying to forget the programs.  

Then there were the first computers--machines roughly the size of a Sherman tank.  Now teenagers everywhere carry electronic devices the size of baseball cards which can send messages, take photographs, contain as much information as exists in the Oxford English Dictionary, do the laundry, cash cheques, and mix a mean mojito. 

Here at Pointless Digressions we are experimenting with an earlier, but still effective, means of communication:  smoke signals.  Please hand me my iBlanket.