Old Tech

Yesterday, digging through some of my old stuff that my sister stashed for me, I encountered a gadget (I never owned - some of their stuff is mixed in with mine) that rather fascinated me; an old (but new looking) Psion PDA. Being always the techno-curious sort, I plumbed the thing together with its battery charger, and fooled around with it this morning to see what tricks it could do. I also downloaded a PDF user manual for it - noting that the manufacturer (Psion) is now defunct.

Silly thing actually works fine, and noting that its original retail price was probably in excess of $100 (way back when non-cellular PDAs were "nifty"), I did my very best to try to figure out what this gizmo might add to my life/routine. Sadly, the answer, after much fiddling, was zilch. My current (near bottom of the line) cell phone is more capable overall in terms of life management (it has many PDA style organizer functions embedded). Between that and the notebook PC I'm writing this on, the (then) snazzy little PDA is 100% obsolete. I'll be putting it in the donations bag along with all the other electronic "junk" we've come across.

Those of you who know me can likely predict where this leads me - to the philosophical (yet strangely practical) issue of "whither thou goest, latest and greatest technology - aye, to the junk heap!"

Certainly, the junking of old technology is nothing new in itself - no doubt the very first plough got tossed into the then equivalent of the backyard junk pile when a new and better version came along. What's astounding to me today is the exponentially accelerating pace of this process I've seen in my own lifetime. Witness the very cell phone that trumped the PDA above; guess how many "junk" cell phones go through the Salvation Army electronics section in a week? I can tell you from my stint there, it's a literal pile - we counted them into boxes of 50 or so, and they got shipped to an (unknown to me) cell phone recycler (one can only hope/imagine what that "recycling" process looks like). For something like cell phones, it's sales shelf to junk bin in far less than a year on average. And how many people in our society carry cell phones?

I'm a trend-bucker, to some degree, in that process. My current cell phone is actually several years old, and rather "minimalist" in terms of features - and it suits me just fine with the new SIM card I bought for it so I could have the pay-as-you-go plan I need currently (at zero income without help, I can't afford to pay for even one minute I don't use). I'll probably keep that phone until it breaks (or I do, or it becomes useless on the latest wireless network) - because I've never had much use for tiny objects that pretense to run my life for me.

Same thing with this notebook - it's a refurbished machine (a pretty decent one even for today), shipped to me with Vista on it (which I hate with a passion - apparently not alone), and outside of upgrading the OS with a "downgrade" to XP if I can ever afford it, I'm not liable to change a thing or want anything new for quite awhile - as long as it still works.

I'm also a "late adopter" of technology, as the OS enlightened realized in reading the paragraph above - yes, I've heard of Windows 7. No, you won't see me going near that one (unless it's dumped on me, like Vista was) until it has a track record of stability equaling or rivaling XP. Meanwhile, here comes (maybe) Google Chrome, and a whole new paradigm of network embedded computing - which likewise will prove itself to me when it does. Am I stodgy? Probably. Then again, everything "new and improved" (Google "oxymoron") has a cost - and personally, I'm broke, and even though that will no doubt change radically in the future, I've meanwhile gotten a hold of some pretty deep values in terms of personal economics. I need what I need, and that can be very different from eye candy (technical or otherwise).