Technology Timescales

Technology does not work on a normal timescale. In most things inventions that change an industry or change the way people think take years, decades, centuries even to come about. With technology they invent something to change the face of technology every year. Possibly even more often than that. And yet, as with some other things, antiquated technology can be vogue in certain circles. How quickly technology changes just makes it more interesting that people will go out of their way to spend more money on old games from their childhood than on new and arguably better games. But not all parts of technology work like this. Old computers and televisions are far from cult-like appreciation that some older technology warrants.

Contained in my apartment there are two laptop computers and a desktop computer (keep in mind that only two people actually live in my apartment). There is a thirty-two inch HD LCD television and a PlayStation 3. There is an entire bookshelf more than full of DVDs, BlueRay Discs and game discs. In a few years most likely my roommate's laptop will have given up the ghost and he'll have purchased a laptop with four times as much processing power that weighs less and has a longer battery life than his current one. It's very likely that I will have purchased a new computer as well even though I only got my laptop as recently as November. The television will have been replaced with something larger and thinner that will hang on our wall instead of sitting on a stand. The PS3, if it still exists, will sit dusty and rarely used in a corner of the living room. The bookshelf full of discs will probably no longer have any DVDs at all and the BlueRay discs will be considered inferior to whatever the next thing is and all the games will long have been traded back to the store to put toward purchasing new and better games.

All of this is true and yet me and my brother and sister-in-law and my nephew frequently spend time, sometimes hours, playing videogames on a system that came out when I was younger than my nephew is now. In fact, in addition to their Super Nintendo they just purchased a original Nintendo (though it has yet to arrive from the land of internet shopping). Some of the games for these two systems (such as the original Zelda) are more expensive than brand-new games now. My oldest brother is actually working on fixing a broken Atari for my previously-mentioned brother so we can play Frogger and some of the other hundreds of dollars worth of old Atari games that have been sitting in a box in my brother's room at my parent's house since well before I can remember. Last night we switched from listening to a vintage vinyl of Jim Croce to a burned CD of Guster music using the same all-in-one radio, record, tape, and CD player while we played a card-based strategy game called Dominion. My nephew watches Dora the Explorer and old VHS tapes of WarnerBros cartoons or Mickey Mouse cartoons old enough to depict Mickey tripping balls after huffing some glue all in the same afternoon.

I recently watched a BlueRay movie, I don't even remember which one, but I laughed until my stomach hurt long before the movie started because of one of the warnings at the beginning. I don't have the exact words but the warning was something like: "This disc has been manufactured to the highest standards in BlueRay technology at the time of its manufacture. You may need to update the software of your BlueRay Player before you can view the contents of this disc." If you had been in the room with me when I read this warning you may have thought I was insane. I'll give you a hint about why I thought this was funny. Imagine if you had dragged out your old VCR and popped in the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie and it was preceded by a warning that the VHS you were about to watch had been manufactured to the highest standards in VHS technology and you might need to recalibrate your VCR before you could view the movie. So in the future when BlueRay is as by-gone as VHS is now and you happen to want to watch the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie for old times' sake in the middle of the night and you see that warning you're going to laugh, too.

And in the future when current top-of-the-line technology is considered antique and you can buy BlueRay discs at GoodWill for a dollar people around my current age will be buying back on eBay the same games they're so eager to trade in for better games now for the sake of nostalgia. Somehow, according to the timescale of technology, this all makes perfect sense. So if you want to invest in your future happiness... save your videogames. Or, you know, study hard in school, get a good job, make lots of money and buy the videogames on eBay when they come back into fashion.