technology
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When I was twenty-two years old, I heard that A. R. Ammons worked in the biological glass industry. I was fascinated because I thought it meant you could make windows out of bacteria or jellyfish.
I used to belive that making a tv was as easy as cennecting a TV antenna to a wire, connecting a little light bolb at the other end of the wire then putting a peice of glass in front of the light bolb when turned on and, WALLA you would see your favorite TV channel projected behind the glass.
When I was a kid I believed there was a little man in the phonograph that made the music.
I used to think that there was day only so we could have light at night. See, there must have been this big box inside my wall that would suck up the light during the day. At night, when the light outside went away, the light would stay inside the little box in my wall. When you flipped on the light switch a shutter would open in the box and the light would filter through tubes that went through the wall to the ceiling to the light bulb. When you turned off the switch the shutters would close. That was my theory on electricity and day and night.
I used to think that conputer viruses were little worms or caterpillars.One day mom was trying to get rid of a virus,then I said "why don't you jump inside and catch it with a net?"
I used to believe that telegraphs worked by pulling on a cable and the person on the other end would be able to feel when it was pulled. I figured that to send a message a really long distance you had to pull really hard, but could never work out how someone would have enough strength to pull the cable hard enough to send a message overseas.
I used to baby sit these three girls, and one day i told them I would copy a CD for them, as in burn. The youngest one, at seven, asked me how you burned a CD... I told her that you just throw the CD you want a copy of, and an empty CD into the fireplace, light up, and when the flames are burned out, the CD would be finished, and you could put it in the CD-player. The next time I came to visit her, I found her throwing a cd into the fireplace... You should really learn to watch what you say around kids...
top belief!
When I was probably about four or five I used to hear about "skyscrapers" and I assumed that these were machines that scraped the sky clean. I have vivid pictures in my head of little upside down yellow bulldozers that would drive back and forth cleaning the clouds away.
top belief!
For the longest time I thought programming was something impossibly difficult, but not in the way you might think. I thought that the only way to program anything was to randomly press buttons, but nobody knew what effect they had. Programmers would press these buttons, and statistically, every once in a while a viable program would be produced. I thought it was a totally blind process, and a miracle anything resulted from it.
top belief!
I used to think I could make televisions or radios using household materials. I gathered napkins, pieces of wood, toothpicks, and other random objects, and set about arranging them and hoping for the best. I figured I just had to position them in SOME way and it would work.
I thought that inside the speaker things you order through in fast food places, there was a little midget who asked what you wanted then radioed the orders to the people at the window.
I used to think that the remote control for the garage door could also be used to open your neighbors' garage doors as well.
When I was very young, I had a Spectrum 48k computer and I wanted to program in it. There was a program in a book I wanted to play, but I didn't think I had to actually program it, I thought you just had to write the name of the program on a tape and load it, and it would work. I drove myself to tears when it wouldn't work no matter how hard I tried!
I liked watching science shows when I was younger, but I guess I didn't understand them too well...I believed that without a doubt that scientists were on the verge of cloning dinosaurs (I couldn't figure out why though!). And when Jurassic Park came out, I thought it was real...
I used to believe that if you peeled the white border off of a Polaroid picture, the people inside would come out to visit with you.
i used to believe that www meant world wide willy until a few months later when i came across a frind who correced me and said it meant world wide web
When I was younger I used to believe that when you faxed someting the paper would de-materialize and the particles would travel through the phone lines and re-materialize later at the other end of the fax machine.
When I was a kid I couldn't figure out how video got to a TV through a tiny little cable, and with so many channels! I figured that a huge set of tiny images must be transferred through the cable using fibre optics or something (like a multiplexed image), and then the TV would pick a section of this big image when you choose a channel, then magnify that section onto the TV screen and voila - TV! I figured the sound was picked up using some sort of radio tuner. I was tempted to cut the cable and see if a bunch of tiny images would project from it! I understand how they work today, but you gotta admit, it's pretty amazing how color video goes through a simple 2-pin cable.
top belief!
I used to beleive that the computer bugs were real creatures that lived in your pc and ate away at it.
When I was 3 we lived with my great-grandmother in Missisiippi and my mom had a record player in our room. (This was in 1967 for those who don't know what a record player is!!) I was so curious about the spinning of it so she told me there was a little man under the record running in a circle making it spin. I always wondered if he had a friend in there to help if he got tired.
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