For the last two months, I have been doing podcasts and video interviews regarding my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck, recently published. It has been an exciting and largely enjoyable experience. Most of the podcasts were audio, although I would have video communication with the person interviewing me.

One podcast was the Silicon Valley Podcast with Shawn Flynn, which I can recommend in general. Shawn decided to great a short animated video which you can watch here. I recommend it. It is fun. However, whoever did it must be too young to remember a time before personal computers. In my book, I describe my first encounter with a computer which took place in 1967. The computer was a PDP-7 from Digital Equipment Corporation. Only 150 of these computers were ever manufactured. Ours was number 145. It cost $500k in today’s dollars and weighed 1,100 pounds, not counting the tape deck. The animation shows me programing the computer using a keyboard and a computer monitor. There were no computer terminals at this time. Instead, we programed and interacted with the computer via a teletype.

The changes in computer technology have been so rapid. The experience of someone 20 is so different than the experience of some who is now 60. Nevertheless, I still laugh when friends tell me that their toddlers keep trying to interact with family television by touching the screen.