by Gerry Conway
I’m a radical technologist.
By this, I mean I love tech– all tech, any tech, indiscriminately. I’ve always been intrigued and often infatuated by each new gadget that promises to bring me a taste of that ever-receding tommowland of the mind, The Future. I am the ultimate, hopeless early-adopter. (Though not as much lately, I admit, as I was in my youth.)
In the early 1970s, I owned a ridiculously expensive Digital Watch that told the time in glowing red numerals when you pushed a button on the side. I owned a Texas Instruments handheld electronic calculator when professional accountants were still using the old type-and-crank manual machines. I wrote on an IBM Selectric when the only way to buy one was to make an appointment with a corporate salesman at the IBM office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I bought a Sony Betamax video recorder the week it went on sale. I was the first person in my family and among my group of friends to use an answering machine. (It drove my mother crazy; she never quite learned how to leave an impromptu message, and for a couple of months she was afraid to call me because she didn’t want to speak to a “robot.”)