Off Topic — HabitableZone

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Being a geek isn't so god-like anymore
dtb — (archived)

In my own life, I kinda feel like there was a "golden age" for me from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s or so, when the microcomputer revolution had gone far enough that there was lots of capability out there, but often not being used to full potential given that the pieces didn't always fit together easily.

For example, there were a couple of times in college and jobs right out of college where I figured out how to get output from the word processing systems that people knew, to laser printers that were sitting around unused. For quite a few profs, I was the first person who ever handed them a typeset-looking paper. Or I used dBase and Word Perfect to automate mass mailings and nametag printing for a student group I was in. Or did cool "desktop publishing" in some early jobs because I figured out Adobe Pagemaker, back when MS Word couldn't do complicated layouts.

Likewise, I impressed the heck out of people with online research using USENET and services like GEnie in 1990, or having my own web page in 1993, when that meant html coding.

And back then, most statistics that were beyond my level of mathematical understanding weren't practically computable on a desktop PC.

Bottom line is it was easy to work miracles -- doing things that others in the office not only didn't know how to do, but didn't know it was *possible* to do.

Today, almost anyone can do multi-color desktop publishing (even if sticking to canned layouts and wizards), create charts and even stats, and everyone is pretty used to computers working and talking to each other and the outside world reliably, and everyone being able to find anything they want to know, instantly. In my academic work, CPU cycles are so cheap that the most estoteric models imaginable are practical (for people with more stats knowledge than me, that is), and methods for which I was writing my own code and waiting hours for runs to complete in 1992 are now built into point-and-click software that any dimwitted college senior can use.

It could be that I'm just getting old and slow to learn new tech myself now -- just like those profs 20 years ago -- but it does seem like there are fewer moments now that have people thinking, "wow, I never imagined anyone could _do_ that".

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