We try to change out the wallpaper every week.  No, not that wallpaper, the iPhone wallpaper, the option you select from among all the others to create the background photo for the home screen.  We take so many photos of little things and scenes around here, and changing out the wallpaper is acknowledging the intersection of art, nature and technology, while experiencing the pleasant surprise of an often stunning photograph of bugs, or beach, or bacon when you tap on the phone, or check the time in the middle of the night.  Sometimes its difficult to part with a certain photo, so we have been known to rotate them in and out for a time, and there are, of course, always wonderful new ones.

Technology.  It’s pretty staggering, isn’t it?  We carry around these small, powerful computers that only a few years ago would have required several large rooms to house, and even then couldn’t do what these can, and each containing a camera of exceptional quality.  Sorry for the plug, but every photo I post on this blog was taken with an iPhone. Im sold on it.  For my purposes, it does everything.  I used to lug around a very nice Canon, with a good telephoto lens, but I find I don’t need it anymore.  Granted, the iPhone zoom is quite inadequate, but that’s more than made up for by the clarity standard and close-up shots.  I’ve discovered that pretty much everything I want to shoot is right in front of me; I don’t need a zoom.

And all this mulling over technology, while tapping this out on a Mac, got me to thinking about how I used to crank out poetry and prose.  First it was on a Royal manual typewriter I inherited from my father.  All my poems and stories for almost ten years, and my first attempt at a novel were accomplished, hunt and peck, on that wonderful beast.  You had to depress the keys a good inch and a half for the letter to strike.  And then there was the manual return, remember that?  And changing the ribbon.  Geeze.  Thing weighed about 60 pounds, too.  It’s still around here somewhere.

And then in the late 80s, being very hip, I bought a Kaypro computer.  I had read that’s what all the Hollywood screenwriters used.  Good enough for them; good enough for me.  The big draw, and this was before any laptops, was that it was portable.  The keyboard could be latched to the front of the thing, and you toted it off to your next film location to revise the script.  Again, very heavy, but hip.

The screen was only 9″, but very clear, with a dark background and green monochrome typing.  You used 5 1/4 floppy discs for storage.  I still have a couple boxes of them somewhere.  It was a durable and reliable machine, but unfortunately, was CP/M based, even as IBM was making inroads with its PC running MS-DOS.  Kaypro never recovered, fell out of the market in the 90s and went out of business around the turn of the century.

I wrote two novels on that machine, both published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the early 90s.  Nobody worked from digital then in any phase of the process. You sent in a hard copy, and they went from there, each step painstaking and labor intensive.  Today you can finish your last read-through at four in the afternoon, and publish at five.  Oh, and let’s not forget the printers.  No wi-fi, no sir.  My printer for the Kaypro was a big hulking thing with spiked rollers at either end of the carriage.  The paper came in reams, the pages connected, with a perforated border of holes that matched the rollers on the machine.  The paper got pulled through on the rollers as it was being printed.  Always noisy, always coming off track and breaking down.

There, I’ve turned into my grandfather, who saw the advent of the electric light, the airplane and automobile, the telephone and television, and the landing on the moon.  Excuse me, but it looks like rain.  I’ve got to check the radar on my phone.