I am treading carefully as I write these posts, trying to avoid stumbling into a kind of grumpy old man nostalgia as I recount the history of technology as I witnessed it.

The first time I recall using a computer was in grade school when the single machine in our entire school was wheeled in on media cart and plugged into the wall for a whole week of our class’ turn to try out this new technology. I think I played a math game if I recall correctly.

By the time I graduated we had a home computer that sat on a desk in the basement and I was one of those nerdy tech-forward kids who did crazy things like submit my essays for English class typed and printed. That was unusual.

I’m sitting here a few decades later typing this on a speedy laptop, smart watch strapped to my wrist, an old but not out of date phone playing music through wireless headphones with more computing power driving each than was inside that computer-on-a-cart I played with in fourth grade.

And today I have multiple “intelligent” systems literally finger swipes away.

How did we get from beeping beige boxes on our desks that we used for learning math and typing essays and keeping track of budgets… to this? How did we get to systems capable of generating a simulation of the human experience?

Progress, yeah.

I mean, I saw it. I was there. I wrote code and built sites and designed software systems and step-by-step we moved from rigidly deterministic machines towards invisible systems capable of generating language and images and code and music and…

I started writing this blog—this collection of mini essays—as a way to start wrapping my head around it for myself and anyone else who might find this kind of analysis interesting. Over the coming months I’ll be writing more about technology change and evolution under the topic Calculators & Collaborators. Stay tuned.