I am really sorry that my dog Tank is dead.  I really do miss him

I watched it happen.  It happened in my lifetime.  It is so commonplace now.  It was a conversion experience.  It is a conversion experience.

One day all the photo film in the store disappeared.

One day are the vinyl 45rpm records in the jukeboxes around the world were missing.

The Encyclopedia changed its name to Wikipedia.

What is a newspaper?

One day all the land line phones in my house disappeared.

For all intent and purposes, these things are gone.

What’s next?  Cars without drivers?  Really?

This is not a lament about the good old days.  It is a realization that in my lifetime I have seen, we have seen, some serious “deaths” to thing that were once just so common.

After college, in the mid-1970s, I worked in a radio station.  Reel to reel tape machines, Carts (cartridge tapes), 2 turntables and thousands of LP Vinyl albums.  I was an on air personality and produced radio shows and feature pieces.  Working with tape, a splicing block, and a razor blade and splicing tape.  It was such fun, and visceral.  I could feel the words and music.  Listening through headphones to build and edit a “perfect” interview.  Cueing up the music to hit a seemless musical sequay from one composition to the next.  I did not even know that I was working in an analog format.  I was just working and creating.

I am not sure when I became aware of how the digital age began in my life.  Nor when I started to experience digital  It had to be in the 80s.  Was it when I graduated from the cellular bag phone to my first Motorola Razr.  Was it when my job converted our order entry systems from a MSI transmission system to my first Toshiba laptop with a 128k processor.  I really don’t know, or more accurately I don’t remember.  Whenever it was, I remember I did not understand it.  It made absolutely no sense to me that I was communicating with a binary system of only 2 digits.  How can a “0” and a “1” do all of that work?

I still don’t understand it.  I don’t understand how a 1 and 0 can make a picture or be a song, but I do believe it.

I do however understand analog.

At least I think I do.  I understand the touch experience and physical quantities.

an-a-log