Where are all of the flying cars?

Written by ls2group

When I was a kid growing up in small town Iowa back in the sixties (yeah you read that right), I was promised flying cars. Every news show I watched on my parent’s new color TV promised us flying cars by the year 2000. I watched the launch of every Apollo rocket with great excitement. I remember watching the first man walk on the moon in 1969. Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather would talk about where technology was heading and how our lives would be so much different in the years to come. America was leading the world in the advancement of technology. We were literally making leaps and bounds every couple of years.

In high school, I remember going into math class one day and being introduced to a thing called a computer. I had never heard of this contraption and had no idea what it did. Our math teacher showed us how it worked. He would type stuff on it, hit a button, and then a whole lot of punch cards with holes in them would come out. Most of us still had no idea what its purpose was. To this day, I have no idea what its function was and it was probably better that I never knew.

I went to college after high school. I typed all of my papers on a typewriter. I hated typing and to this day I still hate typing. I swore up and down to my teacher that I would never have to know how to type in the “real world.” I guess I was wrong on that one.

Then one day in college, a friend showed me this new room in the basement of the library called the “computer lab.” He showed me how to use a couple of 5 1/4” floppy disks to load a program that would allow me to type my paper. This is “the new way of doing it,” he said. There was no such thing as spell check back then. He called it “progress.” I wasn’t so sure.

I graduated from college and moved to the big city of Des Moines. I got a job at a technology company at a time when computer networking was just taking off. There was no such thing as email, laptops, or the Internet. Cell phones were also just starting to become popular however, they were big, bulky, and very expensive.

I learned everything I could about every aspect of technology during this time. I spent countless hours reading and playing with every kind technology. I found it all fascinating. I worked with some of the smartest people in their field and they taught me how to do everything with technology. When I had a question, they would respond almost immediately with a plethora of information. I absolutely loved this part of my life. To be young and carefree in such an advanced learning environment felt like magic. This must be what a young person feels like when their first job is at a company like Apple or Google. That was the feeling I had almost every day back then, just pure wonderment.

I spent 10 years working for that technology company and I still look back with a smile. I remember going to work every day and being a part of something bigger than myself and everyone else who worked there. We were at the forefront of technology every single day. And at the end of the day, we got into our cars and drove home. Just not the flying cars we were promised as kids.

As I look back on my years spent in technology, it has been neat to watch how it has evolved and transformed. It is unbelievable how far we have come and still how much further we have to go. I enjoy using the knowledge I have gained to help people each and every day with my job at LS2group. Do you have a technology question? I’d love to answer it – comment below!