This image has come up a couple of times in as many days, and I wanted to take a minute to share it with the world. I decided to annotate it and publish it here for posterity.
It's a personal favorite for many reasons. One being that just looking at it transports me to a place in my memory, filling it with sounds, smells, textures and reminisce of a days long gone. But it also captures an era and an array of objects that are not only familiar to me, but to many people who grew up in an engineering environment in the same era.
When the topic of "Punch Cards" came up in a conversation at work, I brought this image up and it was a huge hit. Then, this morning, while my son was scrolling through photos on my iPhone and asked about this one, it struck me how dramatic a contrast it was to be looking at an image representing so many things that are now contained within the object displaying the image itself.
I've said it before... It's amazing to see what advances have been made in technology in 10 years, let alone 30. And as I look around my desk at my iPhone, stacks of DVD media, several MacBook Pro's and this MacBook Air, pens on a whiteboard, some laptop batteries, a USB thumb-drive, and s small scale laser printer, I can't help but imagine what my son might think of all this, and how antiquated it will be, when he'd look back at it in another 30-40 years.
Nor can I imagine how he'll be viewing it.
I do know that I'd be as amazed as I expect my own father would, could he see the things on my own desk today.
