I’m watching the trailer for Pixels, because Angela says it was shot in Toronto and there are recognizable landmarks. There are (it’s possible the entire film was shot on University Avenue) but that’s not what grabs me. It’s these three frames:
And I am momentarily confused. Does it seem horribly backwards that we sent human beings into outer space before we invented Donkey Kong?
It’s the following night. I’m watching the first episode of Halt and Catch Fire, because Angela had to go help our youngest fall asleep and I wanted to save Daredevil for the both of us. The show is set in 1983, but 1982 is still on my mind. It’s mostly laughable technology references (ahem desoldering a chip and then pulling it out of a socket) but there’s line near the beginning that catches my booze-addled mind:
Joe: Now tell me one thing that will be true about computers ten years from now.
Cameron: Computers will be connected across one network with a standard protocol.
I had been prepping myself for some crazy too-fast or too-slow answer, but wait a minute, it really was only about ten years from the mass release of the PC to the introduction of the world wide web. It only seemed like much longer to my then-teenaged self because, perhaps, I was a teenaged self.
It is 2015. More than 40 years since the moon, more than 30 years since Donkey Kong, more than 20 since the web. Almost 10 since the iPhone, if we’re picking random technological milestones, so another one should be coming soon, but it’ll take until I’m at least 50 for me to see it or at least decide what it is, apparently.
In the meantime, I build robots with my four year old son and wonder if he will tackle the hard problems that I never noticed until they were solved.