When tech was magic

What's a technological thing that really flipped you out?

Here’s another Fun Friday — and boy, do we need it now! I was inspired to today’s theme recently when I used a simple app thing that I have used hundreds of times before — and remembered how, when I first used it, it struck me as so amazing that, as Arthur C. Clarke said, it was indistinguishable from magic.

When personal computing first took off, I was a broke-ass musician, but I worked in offices and so got to know the technology on a casual-user basis. The first word processor I got my hands on was a Kaypro — blinking cursor, green letters on a white screen, but you could go back and change what you typed, and when you dot-matrix-printed it there were no whiteout stains or eraser smudges to betray where you’d revised. That was a big deal — better than Eaton’s Corrasable Bond!

But when the Macs came in, boy, that was when things got yummy. And then the internet — holy shit! Before I knew it I was staying late at temp and freelance gigs just to use their computers, and even broke down and got myself a little SE30 on a rent-to-own contact — the first gear I’d ever sweated to afford that wasn’t guitar-related.

This was all magical, but in a meta way — that is, it was a massive river of change, and while one could pick out different features that were in and of themselves extraordinary and even life-changing — like BBS, type and graphics programs, email, and internet porn — it all felt more like one big flip-over, a change in the regime. Also some of these features took a while to reveal their real potential — who knew then that internet relay chat would mutate into the texting phenomenon that’s such a big part of our lives now?

Perhaps in consequence, I don’t really recall how most of those early individual tech innovations specifically amazed me.  I do recall being mesmerized, at a late stage in my musical life, by low-cost computer recording, sparked by a free version of ProTools that music stores handed out on discs. It was supposed to be a sample of the high-priced shit pros could buy, but I became determined to find out what I could do with the freebie, and for a few years I went mad with it  — “cracked” programs, pilfered plug-ins, and driving a used Akai drum synth with scores I pecked out on a crap synth into the notation program Encore. But that was like building a little house out of seashells; I was obsessed with the struggle, making the magic myself.

Then I left that behind and became a normal consumer of tech. The consumer market is loaded, but not so much with magic as with hustles. Take call recording, for example, which I use it for work. There are hundreds of products out there, each with little fiddles to distinguish it from the competition, but while the basic efficiency that digital recording affords is nice, there’s nothing magic about any of it.

But in recent years there are two things I can think of that, when they were revealed to me, felt like straight-up magic, and kind of still do:

First, Shazam and SoundHound. Years ago I had asked a techie girlfriend why there couldn’t be an app that analyzed melodies and could tell you from that what the song was. She said it was too difficult. I suppose it was, because the music recognition programs that flourish now react to digital watermarks, so there’s a good chance these apps won’t ID your crackly old disc of the Skillet Lickers, but it can identify millions of other records. If you’re sitting in a bar or walking through a supermarket or even hearing music from a car in the next lane, you have a chance to find out what it is with your phone. As someone who grew up waiting by the radio up to a half hour (or an hour if it was FM) for a DJ to tell me what that rad song I just heard was, this is huge.

Second: The iPhone feature that can extract text from photos. Hooooly shit. Holy fucking shit; that is magic.

And for you?