I learned to program as a college freshman in 1964. I wrote Fortran source on coding sheets, typed them into punch cards, and wrapped some IBM Job Control Language statements around them and submitted the deck to a big hopper in the Science Building: batch jobs running on an IBM mainframe. That was the paradigm. I even wrote a few Fortran programs on paper tape for a PDP-9, one of the first minicomputers.

By the time I finished my undergraduate work in 1971 I was teaching programming to freshmen, and routinely writing code for my classwork and to help my astronomy professors' research projects (most knew no programming at all). The expectation at that time was that all scientists and engineers would learn how to program, and that when they had mathematical calculations to do, they would punch up their cards and carry them down to the nearest university, government agency or large corporation that had a computer and get a printout back with their numerical results in a day or two. It may sound quaint now, but that's what most of my contemporaries believed and how we saw the future. But the future was already taking other shapes in labs all over the country, and it didn't look at all like what we had in mind.

I didn't use any of my computer skills professionally until late in 1978, when I got a job as a scientific applications programmer for a major oil company. No, I didn't misrepresent my abilities, they knew exactly how little experience I had, but they felt that my science and math background and my experience in air photo mapping and mathematical cartography was more important than my systems expertise. What they were looking for was someone who could interface between their scientific staff and their computer people, who knew enough of both worlds to talk to either.

In those days, programming skills were so scarce that you needed nothing else to get a job as a professional data processing person. A degree in an unrelated field (or even no degree at all) meant no trouble getting the job. They just needed people who wrote code. My job was to support geologists, geophysicists, geochemists and petroleum engineers with computer-generated cartography. Eventually I would go to work writing interactive (the latest thing!) applications software in image processing and remote sensing for HP3000 minicomputers.

Fortran hadn't changed much, the major difference was that I now typed my code onto a dumb terminal
instead of punch cards and submitted it electronically for compilation, linking, and execution. The output came out as instructions on magnetic tape which drove big flatbed plotters to produce our maps. It was still batch processing. My electronically displayed imagery and command line interfaces on the HP mini were the shape of things to come, but paper maps were still our bread and butter.

By the early 80s I had moved on to other jobs, and other technologies, including big server-driven clusters of workstations for engineering work, but the idea of everyone having a PC on their desk
was essentially unknown to me until the mid 90s. A general purpose computer for which you purchased specialized software was a new concept for me (what? I can't write my own programs?). So was the idea of microprocessors being embedded in almost every appliance we now have in our homes, or carry about in our pockets. I didn't use the internet until the mid-nineties, and email, as far as I was concerned, was just CB radio for geeks. After all, why bother writing someone when you could call him on the phone? The people that really mattered all had answering machines now, and FAX was going to replace the post office.

The point I've been tediously leading up to here is that technology is not only developing faster than we thought, but it is heading in directions we couldn't have anticipated. And although I have always considered myself to be right on top of things, I have always known I was also way behind. It is no longer possible for most of us to stay current with the technology and develop your own technical discipline, too. Only those who do nothing but the technology can hope to keep up with it. In my own field, cartography, the software is now so advanced that they give degrees and professional ceritication to those who are trained in it. Things like coordinate systems, map projections, affine transforms and geodesy are all handled by software now. Even understanding of the optical, physical and perceptual arts of image processing are now replaced by knowledge of sliders, menus, and wizards. People can do a contrast stetch that can't even explain to you what one is. I actually had one MA in Geographic Information Systems tell me (with some pride) that he didn't need to know the difference between latitude and longitude because he could always look it up if he had to.

If technology continues its unpredictable growth, it is inevitable that we will eventually arrive at a situation where our tools will outstrip our ability to wield them: "Our swords have become too massy for our strengths", as the Bard once told us. As I got older, I naturally lost the ability to adapt to new ideas easily, but in the past I could always make up for this with my accumulating experience. Today, I find that most of what I know is useless, (what good does it do you to have mastered a sextant when the instructions to operate a GPS keypad are almost impenetrable.) Younger people, brought up in this environment, seem to have an amazing intuition for the new technology, but when questioned, often reveal an alarming ignorance of even the most basic concepts of the physics of the situation. And most important of all, those who can quickly pick up on new technologies don't seem to have the time to really get good at them because something new is always displacing the old before they can master it.

I believe we are approaching a cusp, a singularity, where the world will change faster than it will be possible for people to keep up with it. People used to be able to learn their professions from their fathers, now everything I did a decade ago is meaningless today, and every skill I now have is recently acquired, and will be obsolete tomorrow. I'm glad that retirement is near for me. I'm tired.