Of course owing to my own recent birth I never had to hoist a wired panel heaver than my dog to sort cards, change failed computer vacuum tubes, scramble to fix the air-conditioner lest the ‘computer room’ melt down.

Those who did of course were so pleased owing to their recent birth, they no longer had to suffer melting lead to form the printing press pages for newspapers and to mend the wobbly mechanical joints of ‘automated’ player pianos, looms, ‘linotype machines’ and mechancial calculators.

Folk who tended those mechanical adventures felt themselves lucky owing to their recent birth they didn’t have to craft slide-rules and be employed as folk whose full time job it was to do arthimatic via paper and pencil at accounting desks– folk who didn’t have personal experience at needing to understand the difference between a ‘blunder’ and an ‘error’ (the former being a mistake in arthimatic execution, the latter being a mistake in approach). Those were the last generation of folk who appreciated ‘double entry accounting’ as a means to catch mistakes in tallying accounts and sums as well as a means of noticing errors, omissions and mis-filingings.

Of interest, nearly all the useful mathematics needed to set forth and explain the theories of special relativity, compute the motions of the planets and stars, comprehend statistics and probabilities enough to detect the sources of contagious disease (n.b.: don’t live downriver in big cities..) was all crafted in the days before widespread mechanically automated mathematical devices of any sort.

What does the future hold in store? I suggest we are as those who climb a tree, in the early going the only choice available was for all to ascend the trunk since without that no further choices were possible. Now we find ourselves at the mid levels with many branches among which we can explore, but without the ability for any one person to know everything there is to know about the whole.

Our ability to communicate now becomes as important as our ability to understand.