Silicon Insider: Tech Revolutions at Hand
Feb. 13 -- Every technology revolution takes twice as long as we expected, and half as long as we are prepared for.
If nobody else has already said that, call it Malone's Third Law. [The First, by the way, from about 1982, is: Whenever a company builds a new corporate headquarters, short the stock. The Second, from the mid-'90s, is: Any true technology revolution has its own underlying Law.]
Everybody who has lived in the industrialized world over the last 50 years understands what the Third Law means. My first encounter with this peculiar property of modern life came in the early 1960s, with color television.
In the dozen years since the late 1940s, television had gone from an intriguing novelty to the centerpiece of most American living rooms. In the process, it had hit American society like a tsunami. By 1960, we were still reeling from the cultural implications of Davy Crockett, the Today Show, the Friday Night Fights, the Quiz Show scandals, American Bandstand, Bishop Sheen, Liberace and Ed Sullivan. And coming over the horizon were the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Beatles.
In the early years of TV, pundits predicted that the technology would be a slowly accepted, and ultimately elevating, force in modern life. By the first episodes of I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody, that fantasy had long been abandoned. Now there was a headlong rush by everybody in America to get that Muntz or Philco box set up in the living room and an aerial on the roof and tune in to Dinah Shore.
So, what had been predicted to take a generation instead took only a decade. But what had also been predicted to be easy, the implantation of television programming into daily life, proved to unbelievably complex, difficult, transformative and enduring. In some ways we are still trying to recover from what happened to us.
Ringing in the PC Age
Now, with the new decade, there was a whole new television technology appearing down at the local appliance store: color. I remember vividly the conversations of my parents and their suburban neighbors at cocktail parties and barbecues. It was: color TV sounds interesting, and it's probably beautiful to look at — but who needs it? Not at that price. We'll stick to black and white, thank you very much.
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