The Spring of 1982. It was the end of my senior year in high school. Hard to believe but that was 25 years ago. I had the opportunity to take a class in -- now get this -- Computer Programming. It seemed very cool. My teacher was a first or second year teacher who was six years older than me. I had known hime when he was in high school and college. In fact, he'd given me rides home a time or two.

We programmed in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 computer. Our programs did things like add single digit numbers together. You were pretty advanced if you could write an "if-then" statement. We recorded our programs on cassette tapes.

I suspect that my electric toothbrush today has more computing power than that TRS-80 did but it seemed very cool at the time.

After I started college that fall, I took a class in BASIC programming. It was sort of a continuation of the high school class except that our programs were stored on some gargantuan computer that hummed, whirred and clunked mysteriously behind a wall next to the computer lab. Well, it made those noises when it was working. Dr. Edmiston, in his white lab coat or his scruffy sweater, was responsible for keeping it running. That seemed like a major task.

It seemed easy to keep up with technology back then. I swore that I would always stay up with technology -- it couldn't be that hard.

During my last couple of years of college, I worked for the small town weekly newspaper. They were just then making the change from setting type by hand and shooting it with a huge camera to doing it on computer. They had a couple of "portable" KayPro computers that they would allow me to borrow occasionally. That process consisted of me lugging about 50 pounds of hulking machine up to my third floor dormroom. The KayPro had a screen that was about 6" diagonally but the benefit was that I could type stuff in and then print it out.

Memory typewriters were big back then, too. I had one that you could type about a line of text into and then make changes to before you committed that line of text to paper. My first memory typewriter was a small Brother that printed dot matrix on thermal paper. My profs hated when I would use it to writer papers because it was so difficult to read. Of course, I'd actually bought it used from another prof -- something I pointed out to my aqing (but very kind) English prof more than once.

Then some memory typewriters came along that you could actually type into and have them store entire documents. After I was out of college and working, I would lug one of these back to my apartment most nights and print off 30 or 40 letters to potential customers interested in our products.

I entered the business world in 1986. We bought a fax machine in about 1988 as I recall and that seemed fascinating. I was able to make it work -- actually send words to other people almost instantly. On curly thermal paper. Our first fax machine was roughly the size of a small armadillo.

Our first PC at work -- a CompuAdd -- came along in about 1990. We had a telephone modem and could access the internet through a Prodigy account. Prodigy was owned by Sears. Because of my travel schedule, I was pretty big on "portable" technology. I bought laptops pretty early including some very early and limited versions of laptops. I still have many of these computers. I think I could start a computer museum if anyone really cared. One of my early laptops caught fire as I was using it in my office one day. I guess that even my two-fingered typing was more than it could handle. I also owned some electronic Rolodexes back then which seemed like incredible technology that allowed me to take my Contacts lists with me when I traveled. Later, I owned a couple of early HP Jornadas, also heared towward portable computing.

I still felt like I was keeping up fairly well with technology ... and then it seemed like things zoomed past me. You had to be an IS or IT person to keep up with this stuff. It wasn't that I lost interest ... or maybe it was. I'm not sure. But it all zoomed by me it seemed.

My business recently switched manufacturing software programs. A month into the actual official start of the new program, I had to finally admit the other day that a link to the new software had never been loaded onto my new laptop purchased late last year. That was a bit embarrassing to admit.

I do now have one of those silly Bluetooth cell phone headsets that you hang on your ear. I actually figured out how to use the technology itself pretty quickly ... but it seemed like I am going to break my ear trying to attach it to myself. There is something very geeky about wearing your technology. I swore I'd never do it but my new cell phone has a touch screen and you really can't hold it up to your face without pushing things you didn't want to push and starting processes you didn't want to start. But I can get my email on it. I guess that's a good thing.

Anyway, I guess that I am not entirely giving up on trying to keep up at least a little bit with technology. But whereas before it seemed like something that I would naturally be able to do, today it seems like a formidable challenge ... even hanging this silly thing with the silly technology name on my ear.