On Being a “Boomer”
Generations
When I was growing up
in the 1950s and onward there was not all this talk about generations
that seems to have become a fascination of the last twenty years.
Although I became aware of the baby boom and even the term baby
boomers (now apparently just boomers), I instinctively assumed the
baby boomers were the people that had the babies. It was only
recently that I realized that it referred to the children and I was
one of them.
Indeed the original
ideas for this blog had nothing to do with boomers but was simply to
recount how lucky I was to be born at this time and live through all
these changes, particularly the technological ones. But since
labelling us folks born during this time as boomers seems to be the
in thing I thought I might as well go with the flow, thus the title
of this post.
This meant at least
some cursory research into generations which Wikipedia explains this
way. But the first thing I learned is that these generations are
simply time periods people talk about in their own ways. There are no
officially defined generational periods, no consensus on what the
names of these periods are and not even a consensus on how long a
generation is, even within individual generational schemes. So it's a
good thing I am not talking about generations but just my time on
this planet.
Growing up in the
1950s and 1960s
The 1950s and 1960s, at
least in northern Ontario, was a great time to grow up. It was a time
when all elementary school kids could walk or bike to school because
we had eight room neighbourhood schools. Yes, we didn't have proper
gymnasiums or any sort of shop rooms, or even libraries, but we
managed without that until high school. There were no computer rooms
because there were no computers, It was a time when on weekends we
could wander away wherever to play in the rocks and bush by the
railroad tracks and creek and the slag dump. We could bike all over
town and once I even biked all the way to our camp (cottage for you
non-northerners).
Progressing into the
high school period, school spirit was a big thing. Anyone from
Sudbury remember the school lunch bag contests ? Music was the other
big thing. School dances always featured live bands. When the bands
took their breaks and records where put on everybody stopped dancing.
The groups were often other high school kids. Anyone remember The
Sound Expressway. Local Battle of the Bands contests were a regular
affair usually emceed by one of the local DJs who were more than
minor celebrities in their time. Radio was our main source of music,
and calling in requests and dedications were what you did while doing
your homework and listening to your favourite DJ on the radio.
Remember G. Michael Cranston.
Unions and the
Middle Class
One of the most
important facts about this time was the role of the labour movement
and the fact that the 1950s was a time when we still built things in
North America. Unions enlarged the middle class from being just the
professional and merchant class to include working people enabling me
to have a middle class upbringing and life as the son of a hard
rock miner.
Public Health Care
It was in 1947 that
Medicare,
as our public health care system is known, was
first introduced in Saskatchewan, and it was adopted by the
federal government and all provinces during the 1950s and 1960s.
Social Change
The period from 1950
until present day was a pretty good time to be a heterosexual white
male Canadian of European descent. If you did not fit that category
(or even if you did) it was a period of great opportunity to fight
for social progress. This included the 1960s and 1970s, decades
defined by battles for social change, particularly on university
campuses. Laurentian
University at the time was known as the Berkeley of the North, It
included the civil
rights movement, women's
liberation movement, LGBTQ
rights movement, and the adoption of multiculturalism
in Canada.
From the 1950s to
current day we saw a huge change in the role of women in the
workforce and economy (and the role of men in the home and family)
and we saw the LGBTQ community advance from being whispered about in
the shadows to fully accepted members of society.
This is not to say that
discrimination, bigotry, racism, misogynism, etc no longer exists but
we have matured as a society to where inclusion and diversity are
accepted Canadian values. We have come a long way.
The Peace Movement
and The War Against The War
No
discussion of the time of the baby boom generation would be complete
without mentioning the struggle against the Vietnam
War, the War
Against The War waged during
the 1960s, inspired by a long history of the Peace
movement, and more particularly the late 1950s Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament. Canada played it's part as "Vietnam
War resisters were welcomed as heroes in Canada" (Montreal
Gazette).
It
was perhaps the generation's most defining moment.
Technology
Indeed I could talk
much more about social change during this period but these advances
were not the original motivation for this post. Rather it was to talk
about how we were so fortunate to live through this period of
technological advances. Other periods of history have seen
technological advances such as the printing press, industrialization,
still and moving picture photography, the telegraph and radio, but
never so much so fast as this era from television to the Internet,
where we have in many cases surpassed science fiction.
Television
I was three years old
in Sudbury when television
was first available to the city. Although it was a few or several
years before TV ownership became widespread enough that we had one I
was old enough to remember first getting television. I guess one
could call it our generation's “screen time” although we were not
nearly as enamoured with it as people seem to be with “screens”
these days. It was something that amused us when we were finished our
homework and it was too dark to go out and play or early weekend
mornings before we went to meet our friends.
But that was just the
beginning. Those of us born in the 1950s would see television go
through many evolutionary stages from the development of cable
television with cable only channels to streaming services over the
Internet. Cable and satellite television came to be dominant over
broadcast TV and may soon be supplanted by Internet streaming. We may
even see the complete end of traditional broadcast television in my
lifetime.
And of course. the the
quality of the picture has improved with the quality of the screens
used to watch it. First with the introduction of colour and then flat
screens replacing CRT tubes along with higher resolution images for
much better picture quality.
As to content, that has
evolved in two directions, while production values have improved and
the amount of high quality content has increased, the multi-channel
universe has created space for an increasing amount of crap (can you
say reality TV) on our screens.
Computers and
Personal Computers
While
the history
of computers can be traced back to Charles Babbage in the 1800s,
the first commercial computer UNIVAC
was put into service in 1951. The early commercial computers
were first designed and produced to perform specific tasks for
specific customers. General purpose computers came later. The
programming language COBOL was develop in 1953 and Fortran in 1954.
The IBM
System/360 was first produced in 1964. These mainframe computers
revolutionized business and industry. The revolutionizing of our
personal lives would come later.
We got our first
personal
computer in 1981, an Osborne
1, the world's first portable computer. It was a powerful
computer with a 4.0 mHz processer and 64K RAM and two 92K 5.25 inch
disk drives. $2,500 Canadian with another $800 for an Epson 9 pin dot
matrix printer. A huge 10 Mb hard drive was available for $10,000.
But this was a powerful machine for it's time. It was usable out of
the box with bundled software, including WordStar
and SuperCalc,
plus MBASIC and
CBASIC, and the
CP/M operating
system, a suite of software worth the price of the computer by
themselves. We also managed to acquire a cope of dBASE
II.
Previous personal
computers were aimed at computer hobbyists and nerds who wanted to
learn about computers and programming. The Osborne 1 was one of a new
group of computers designed as productivity tools. This was only the
start of the personal
computer revolution
which soon saw ordinary people with computers more powerful than the
ones that put a man on the moon sitting on their desks.
Indeed, Wordstar made
writing so much easier and SuperCalc allowed for financial wizardry
on the Osborne 1. But Dbase II was the most interesting and fun with
it's own programming language. My first big Dbase II project was
creating an Index to The
Portable Companion, the magazine for users of Osborne portable
computers. My most ambitious project was creating a prototype key
word indexing system for Hansard, the House
of Commons Debates, and a computerized voting record database,
at least 10 years before the House of Commons developed their own
much more powerful Publication
Search system.
Our next personal
computer was an IBM
XT clone,
that ran MS-DOS,
and following that new machines about every three years till we
purchased our current machine on April 12 2013, with Windows 7, now running Windows
10.
Indeed it was quite a
surprise when I checked back to see when I purchased this current
machine. This is a clear sign that personal computing has matured and
the average user does not need any more computing power. Of course
gaming is a different matter. Putting a man on the moon did not
require fancy 4k video imaging and fast graphics. It just required
number crunching. Which is why it required much less computing power
than making a game about it. That is also why today it is home
computers that need more power and capability than business machines
– number crunching requires much less power than high definition
video.
But yet we may be soon
coming full circle to the pre-home computing days when computing
involved dumb terminals connected to main frames. The tech industry
seems to want to go that way with all your applications and even
personal data storage in the amorphous “cloud“
(a network server somewhere), somewhere in the great unknown.
Computer Networks
from BBSs to the Internet
But home computers were
not just for nerds sitting at home looking at a screen and writing
programs. The first home computers soon led to computing networks
that were the forerunner of the internet, computer Bulletin
Board Systems (BBSs)
that allowed users to to share their knowledge via discussion forums
and also share software via download capability. I used at least one
BBS to share my index of The Portable Companion. Surprisingly, they
still exist .
However they were
replaced to a certain degree by larger proprietary online
service providers like CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. These
systems provided information services, online forums, messaging
services, downloadable files and programs, etc.. They were the
forerunner to the Internet but they were proprietary corporate
systems. They were very much like Facebook except it was very clear
how you paid for access, with a monetary subscription fee. They died
off, essentially by transforming themselves into Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) as users embraced the open Internet, preferring that
to getting all their online information from one commercial source
(until Facebook).
Then came the The
Internet but it was not accessible to the general public until
Free-nets provided that access.
The word mark Free-Net was a registered trademark
of the National
Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN), founded in 1989 by Tom
Grundner at Case
Western Reserve University. NPTN was a non-profit organization
dedicated to establishing and developing, free, public access,
digital information and communication services for the general
public.[4]
It closed operations in 1996, filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.[5]
However, prior use of the term created some conflicts.[6]
NPTN distributed the software package FreePort, developed at
Case Western Reserve, that was used and licensed by many of the
free-net sites.
Any
person with a personal computer, or through access from public
terminal in libraries, could register for accounts on a free-net, and
was assigned an email
address. Other services often included Usenet
newsgroups,
chat rooms,
IRC, telnet,
and archives of community information, delivered either with
text-based Gopher
software or later the World-Wide
Web. (Source: Free-net
- Wikipedia )
In Ottawa it was the
National
Capital FreeNet (NCF) that provided the public with not only
access to the Internet of the time but also access to e-mail, which
started a communications revolution of it's own. The free-nets also
provided a way for community organizations to reach the public, not
only in their home communities but internationally as the free-nets
were all inter-connected via the Internet. At this time the Internet
was completely non-corporate and there was a huge debate, the
conclusion of which was clearly predictable though not so obvious at
the time, about whether corporations should have access to the
Internet. It would certainly be different if that had gone the other
way.
At the start of the
free-nets the World Wide Web had not been developed so the FreePort
menu system provided the accessibility that would later be provided
by the web.
As an early member of
the NCF, user ab190, I was also one of it's first “information
providers” operating an information service for the Bridlewood
Residents Hydro Line Committee on FreePort which later became
the Bridlewood Electromagnetic Fields Information Service on the
World Wide Web. It was one of and possibly the first NCF information
services to move from Freeport to the Web. One of my proudest moments
was when the World Health Organization (WHO) linked to the Bridlewood
Electromagnetic Fields Information Service.
I took it offline when
I stopped updating it but the Bridlewood
Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) Information Service is available on
a mirror site provided by The
Swedish Association for the Electro HyperSensitive - www.feb.se
(FEB Sweden), in it's final state.
When the Internet
became easily available via high speed broadband through DSL
or Cable
Internet the need for the free-nets disappeared, though many,
like the National Capital Freenet became non-commercial Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) aimed at making the Internet available
to as many people as possible.
Communications
Replaces Computing
With
the Internet computers became as much a communications tool as a
data, word and image processing tool and newer technologies to come
would lead to a dominance of communications over computing in our
electronic devices. Telephones (nobody calls them that anymore) would
be marketed for their photographic capabilities and voice
conversations would be their least important use.
And
it all started with Agent 86 and his shoe
phone. Once the purview of science fiction now it seems every ten
year old has a compact portable videophone that is rarely used for
making phone calls. Desktop
computers are the rare purview of computer
gamers and purists like me who prefer a larger screen and a desk
to sit at to do my computing which still includes not just
communication but a lot of writing and some photo processing. For
most people laptop or
notebook computers have replaced the standard desktop and some
folks just rely on the new fangled tablets,
for their entertainment, information and communications needs.
The smartphone
has replaced the personal computer as the electronic device of choice
and it may only be a matter of time until the smartwatch
(which may even include a minor timekeeping function) will replace
that.
Smart
homes
Smart
homes are the latest tech trend. Well actually not so new as the
first article cited below points out: 'In 1975, the
first general purpose home automation network technology, X10,
was developed. It is a communication protocol for electronic
devices.“
I certainly recall many
years ago homes being built pre-wired with Ethernet
(and sometimes also Coaxial)
cable for home networking. The individual components like
programmable home thermostats and video monitoring systems
accessible from the Internet and of course remote controlled lighting
systems just to mention a few have been available for quite awhile.
What is new is the use
of voice commands yelled at tabletop orbs as the hub of smart home
controls. In reality I doubt any serious smart home will be
controlled that way. It will much more likely be via a dedicated
control panel that is probably also accessible on a computer or
tablet, perhaps even smartphone or watch via the Internet.
Smart
home resources
Conclusion
This
period since the birth of the baby boomers has certainly been one of
technological change, though not all of it progress. While much of
the world still lives in abject poverty another portion lives in
relative wealth, some absurdly so. I have not mentioned all of the
technological “wonders” the age has bestowed upon us, some of
them just plain silly like electric plug in air fresheners and
refrigerators that talk to your milk cartons so they can order new
milk when you run out. My “favourite” misuse of technology are
automobiles now being marketed, not for having the best engines or
transmissions, but the best “infotainment
system”.
Being a baby boomer is about living through change.
Postscript
I
started talking about the gains made by the working class through the
union movement during the baby boom years (1946-1964), gains we can
actually thank the previous generations, including the so-called
Silent Generation, for. They may have been silent but they were very
active having been responsible for much of labour and civil rights
movements and having built a more equal society.
That
society has over the years become increasingly unequal, not only
between the developed and third world but also within the so called
developed world, with the latest generations, the so-called
Millennials and Generation Z, becoming perhaps the first in recorded
history to be worse off economically than the previous generations
(except for a select few who control the economic system, what one
might call the means of production). Their challenge is perhaps the
greatest, to build a truly just and sustainable society, one that I
discuss here: THE
FIFTH COLUMN: Towards a Green Social Democratic Economy.
