Technology and Me

I first became interested in electronics at a very early age, so early I don't remember it. I know it was at St. Bonaventure preschool that I saw my first computer and got to move blocks around the screen. My brother an I eventually owned an Atari. All those early games that the two of us played endlessly in spite of their pitiful graphics and stiff controls: Asteroids, Air Sea Battle, Baseball, Othello, Pac-man. We spent hours mastering E.T. and even owned the ill-fated Kool-aid Man. Ever since those early years, I've wanted to know how they worked.

Electronics wasn't my first love, however. I wanted to be a magician first. I had lots of simple magic tricks and even got to amaze my friends from time to time. Magic incorporated two basic concepts into one: showmanship and engineering. Every time, the "magic" in the trick was a simple physical principle working behind the scenes. My primary interest in magic was that I liked to know how things worked.

I first started learning about electronics shortly after moving to St. Louis, with a hand-me-down electronics project set: an array of simple components connected to springs that you could wire together in lots of different ways according to diagrams. I learned to read a circuit diagram rather well, but the circuit design itself, or what the components did individually, was beyond me. I was also into puppetry, which incorporated the showmanship/engineering concepts as well. I started reading about robotics.

My father and I have a lot more in common than either of us like to admit. We never got along because we're both the kind of guy who absolutely must be the smartest person in the room. My teachers encouraged that kind of behavior in me, probably because they thought it was cute, but my father didn't like the competition. We did try to get along one summer, I think I had just gotten out of 3rd Grade. I had quit Cub Scouts just like my brother, David, after one year, but we still received Boy's Life magazine. One month that year, they published a set of plans for a do-it-yourself toy robot. Mom hoped that working on it together would bring us closer together. She was wrong, but it did help a little.

So Dad taught me to solder, and showed me around RadioShack, which I found fascinating. All those wires and tiny components for do-it-yourself electronics. Dad, I think, knew how to solder because he worked on cars, but he was also into electronics some. He showed me how to hold the iron so I didn't burn myself, how to melt the alloy onto the wires so they permanently held together. That was all. The body of the robot was a plastic trash can. It incorporated two double-motor assemblages, one for the wheels and one for the arms. The head was connected to the body with a lazy-susan bearing so it rotated freely. Parts of it were wood. In spite of the motors being advertised as "locking" it was impossible to keep the PVC-pipe arms in place. Once they were raised, they immediately fell. The wheels would not keep from rolling downhill either.

The most complex part was the control box which connected to the robot body via a short, clunky ribbon cable. There were four toggle switches, each operating a different motor. To move the robot you flipped each switch individually. It was basically a remote-control toy but without the antenna and you couldn't stand further than three feet behind it. I loved that we had built it. I liked to show it off even though it was mostly my dad's work.

I guess the main reason I didn't make it further in electronics was the expense. Sure, you can buy a lot of simple components for a few cents, but you'll never build anything more complex without more expensive chips and custom designed etched circuit boards. Designing your own chip could cost you a million or more. After a few years, it started seeming like everyone I knew was farther ahead in technology than I was. First, they all had computers when I didn't. Then, they all had better computers than I did. I learned as much as I could, but it wasn't enough when everyone I knew, even those who weren't much into computers had better ones than I did. One of the biggest chips on my shoulder was not having access to the equipment I needed to learn what I needed to learn.

In high school, I was the school's computer whiz. There's a plaque on the wall, an award for excellence in computer science given out every year. My name is the first name on it. When I earned it, the only computer I owned was eight years old: an Apple IIc my parents had gotten David and me, which I wrote all my papers on and still wrote Basic programs for. The computers the school used were even older: RadioShack TRS-80's. The Internet was already in full swing but I knew nothing about it. Worst of all, I had no idea how far behind I was.

In college, I spent my first several years just catching up only to learn that in that time, everything had moved on and I had to catch up still further. I met students who knew more about computers just because they had more money than me. What could I have accomplished if I had only had access to better equipment?

So I never learned everything I needed to learn, or want to learn. My earnest desire: to learn how things worked, got pushed aside while I struggled to keep up with technology: the lastest programming languages, the latest frameworks, trying to keep my skills marketable, which I never accomplished. One of these days I want to go back to school and learn what I really need to learn. Then maybe I can accomplish something.