New technology is great, but it doesn't do much good if it's too complicate for the average person to use it. Not everybody is a technical wiz and not everybody has an engineering background. Most individuals want the newest technology, these fancy devices that help make life easier and more enjoyable, but they do not want things that are so complicated and clumsy to use that they can no longer see the benefits in using it.
This is the way most technology succeeds, it has to get past the awkward, non-user friendly phase and somebody has to present it to the men and women as something worth using. It also has to be user friendly enough to get the initial group of non-technical individuals to accept and to use it. You used to be able to tell who was technically inclined and who either wasn't technically inclined or just didn't care by performing one small test in their home.
All you had to do was go into their living room or wherever they kept the VCR and if it was blinking 12:00 over and over, you knew what kind of person you were dealing with. If it was set to the correct time, then it was more than likely that the person operating the VCR could also record a program by setting the VCR to do so at a certain time.
If the clock was blinking, you probably would be taking a chance by trusting that your show was going to get recorded correctly. The point is, that those old VCR's were not as user friendly as many of the new technologies are today. Plus you have to add the fact that many more people have been exposed to high tech devices at an earlier age than at any other time in history. There are kids graduating college this year that can't remember a time before the internet and cell phones.
It seems amazing to anybody over the age of say thirty five, but it wasn't so long ago that both of those things were things that were in the future, not in our homes. That's the great thing about technology, it keeps moving forward in better and more useful ways. And as long as there are tech-heads and men and women that demand the newest, fastest and sleekest devices, there will be a group of us left behind, wondering how to set the clock on the VCR.
This is the way most technology succeeds, it has to get past the awkward, non-user friendly phase and somebody has to present it to the men and women as something worth using. It also has to be user friendly enough to get the initial group of non-technical individuals to accept and to use it. You used to be able to tell who was technically inclined and who either wasn't technically inclined or just didn't care by performing one small test in their home.
All you had to do was go into their living room or wherever they kept the VCR and if it was blinking 12:00 over and over, you knew what kind of person you were dealing with. If it was set to the correct time, then it was more than likely that the person operating the VCR could also record a program by setting the VCR to do so at a certain time.
If the clock was blinking, you probably would be taking a chance by trusting that your show was going to get recorded correctly. The point is, that those old VCR's were not as user friendly as many of the new technologies are today. Plus you have to add the fact that many more people have been exposed to high tech devices at an earlier age than at any other time in history. There are kids graduating college this year that can't remember a time before the internet and cell phones.
It seems amazing to anybody over the age of say thirty five, but it wasn't so long ago that both of those things were things that were in the future, not in our homes. That's the great thing about technology, it keeps moving forward in better and more useful ways. And as long as there are tech-heads and men and women that demand the newest, fastest and sleekest devices, there will be a group of us left behind, wondering how to set the clock on the VCR.
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