Day 17: Technology

I am a geek, always have been.

Since I first picked up a DOS manual to fix a friend's computer at Uni I was hooked. I can even remember writing boot instructions for a BBC B disk drive an uncle gave me when I was still at secondary school. Nerdness was in the blood.

Before retraining to be a teacher, I worked in IT for nearly 10 years in a variety of roles and it always made sense to me; to get things to work was easy, be they networks, printers, PC's, SQL queries, IBM interplatform messaging technologies, etc, etc. and command line UNIX was a joy!!

However, one thing that baffles me senseless is the actual nitty-gritty of it all. I have a real problem imagining what possibly lies in-between the basics of 1's and 0's and what eventually ends up at the human interface. I know that deep down the logical on/off, present/absent or 'flow of electricity'/'no flow of electricity' is at the bottom of the stack. How this finally evolves into games, graphics, video, music, control and response is pure magic in my eyes. I doubt there is one single person alive that understands every step through each layer!

To be honest, the fact that grooves in a bit of flat plastic can produce such clarity in music and song is beyond me. Bumps and scratchy sounds...yes. But to produce any perfect audible sound on a record is a true wonder. It's amazing to think just how far this has come in my lifetime. The music I play is timeless, but the means by which I play it doesn't ever last more than a decade.