Progress Rocks

A young woman in my office sent around a link to this video yesterday, with this message:

"Considering what most of us do all day, I thought this was hilarious."



I'm assuming it was "hilarious" to her, b/c she--like most of us at Imagination Publishing--sits around all day creating custom content for websites and blogs and magazines, most of which is produced for consumption in a Web browser. It also shows someone using a rotary-dial telephone and placing the handset into a weird-looking cup-holder in order to receive information from another computer far, far away.

The whole thing is funny to me for a different reason: I actually remember all this stuff. (I also remember Atari, Pong, Jane Fonda fitness videos, and rainbow-colored toe-socks.)

As a part-time sports reporter at the Arkansas Democrat in the late 1980s, I used the same computers seen in this S.F. Examiner newsroom, and I used the same kind of cup-holder for the handset in order to transmit breaking news from the Saline County fair back to the Democrat newsroom.

I also remember a job at a public affairs firm in 1996. We all had computers on our desks, and we all had separate, dial-up modems we used to access a service called Lexis Nexis for research. We did not have email until one of our clients (AT&T) insisted we sign up, so we could transmit documents between our office in Little Rock and their office in Dallas.

And, here I sit, 13 years later, embedding a YouTube video in a blog post, like it's nothing.

I ask you, what is more exciting that progress that moves so fast, you actually know you're witnessing it, and even making it happen just by participating?

It's awesome.