Future tense

It just doesn't pay to look back. While flipping (figuratively and literally) through an October 1962 issue of Electronic Products, I was taken aback by the antiqueness of what I saw–for example, in the products-of-the-month section, a ferrite-core memory stack and a complex-number slide rule. What I like to call the recent past suddenly has taken on the patina of a Flash Gordon movie. All of the cutting-edge technology of the age looks like it was cut out of cardboard. How in the world did we ever get to the moon with this stuff? I can see the engineers of 2040 flipping through this issue of Electronic Products and commenting, “Man, this stuff looks like an old Luke Skywalker movie–these components are big enough to see. Look at those test instruments–they actually have knobs and screens.” Some old-timer might comment, “Well, things were slower in those days–they only dealt in nanoseconds and gigabytes.” “Wow,” a kid 300 miles above Tuscaloosa gasps, his transparent image frowning in wonder, “how did they ever stream their holograms?” When I graduated from a military electronics training command and found that my knowledge of vacuum tube circuits had just become obsolete, I shrugged my shoulders and started learning transistor theory. That educational trail led to integrated circuits and explorations of hole flow, matrix theory, truth tables, and machine code.
The acceleration of change in our lives today becomes glaringly clear when perusing past issues of technology magazines like Electronic Products. Now that I feel somewhat competent in my professional life, it all changes again. OK, I can extrapolate a certain level of comprehension about photonics from my electronics experience, but quantum dots, nanotubes, and bio-MEMS? It's like my car–I used to be able to break it down and put it together again, no sweat. Two weekends, start-to-finish, tops. Now that my car is turning into an extension of my PDA, I can't touch that. So if I see an article describing a research result involving a serial computing problem with one unique solution out of one million possibilities that has been successfully solved with a DNA-based computer, I run and grab old issues of Electronic Products and comfort myself with how far we've come in only 40 years. There should be nothing to fear in the future. But contemplating the logarithmic learning curve that will be required, I still get future tense. How about it? Do you feel like you're keeping up in your field, or do you feel like a blacksmith in the 21st century? Gary Evan Jensen, Associate Editor