With technology expanding faster than knowledge -- which itself is doubling now every 16 months -- lingering too long over coffee can put us behind. Recently, just before I left on a three-week speaking tour, I digested the monthly edition of Mac World. By the time I returned and caught up on my reading, the new MacWorld got buried in the bottom of the pile. The next issue popped up first and I promptly got into it. After reading one or two stories, I flipped back to the cover to check the date. I did this by leaping over the interim issue I had been left behind. It seemed like another world.

Accelerating change is making some people dizzy, uncertain and apprehensive. We have to get used to the speed. Remember how as kids we all used to spin around until we got dizzy and then sat (or fell) down. If we turned slowly nothing happened. But some became experts, like the "whirling dervishes" of Turkey and Africa. So anything can be solved. But it takes time and effort. Computer literacy helps us to enter into modern times and profit from spinning faster.

Since some six-year-olds are instructing teachers about new technology, and I can handle it at age 76, so can you. Think of the trouble the caveman had, not with the sabre-tooth tiger he had learned to conquer, but with all this stuff about planting seeds and milking cows, new to him as he entered the Agricultural Age. The same thing happened to farmers who had to move to an assembly line and read a blueprint. Now that was scary.

Many who operate a modern kitchen today would have been considered geniuses if they had appeared and operated the same kitchen 75 years ago. Now we handle all our modern appliances with ease and hardly recognize how much we have learned in this sphere.

Relax. Technology can be good. Go for it. It gets easier all the time.

Technology Changes All

Most people have heard about Johannes Gutenberg and about his 1450 invention of movable type which gave us the printing press, and how this invention changed the world. It changed peoples' lives, as well as the worlds of religion, economics, and education, not to mention the map of Europe.

Fewer people are familiar with how the astrolabe, perfected centuries earlier, also changed the world. The astrolabe, which permitted direct measurement of latitude, allowed the creation of the Age of Discoveries. It permitted extensive marine navigation that led little Portugal to quickly becoming, thanks to King Henry the Navigator and captains Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, the leading world maritime and economic power, all within a mere 80 years. In other fields, individuals gained new power as they acquired more knowledge. That changed the nature of the game, not merely the rules and regulations.

In the past such pivotal inventions or discoveries have come about, it seems, once every 500 years. They show up in historical record. The fall of Rome in A.D. 500. About A.D. 1000, the Middle Ages were replaced by The Dark Ages. Around A.D. 1500, our Modern Age began with Gutenberg, Luther, Columbus, and Da Vinci. This was the Renaissance.

Then there was the advent of steam-power, interchangeable parts, and assembly lines. Around the same time came the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. With them came the Industrial Age.

The landed gentry existed up to 1870, with their vast estates and plantations. Prior to that, 750 English families, clinging to the privileged position of holding land grants from the king of between 10,000 and 30,000 acres, did not share the wealth. Money, when you are merely holding onto it, can vanish quickly. What value was owning the land when the man who controlled the McCormick reaper could employ one man to do the work of 10. Wealth passed basically from land to machine. This caused land values in Britain to fall dramatically in 40 years, as grain from the more efficient American farming system reduced the value of land that required 10 Englishmen to harvest the same value of grain that one American was now producing. Steam railroads and steamships contributed to the process of industrial change and the transfer of wealth.

Today we are approaching the start of another 5OO-year cycle. As the Communications Age replaces the Industrial Age, vast changes are apparent. Something massive is happening, and what is happening is different from past changes, when most people had no idea that something radical was occurring. Today we know that something major is happening, although we aren't sure what. Now you too can know how Columbus felt when he set out for China and discovered America.

Egypt had a great culture for thousands of years. Today the winds of change continue to blow sand over their monumental achievements. We still don't clearly understand how the pharaohs accomplished such wonders which have outlasted them by 5,000 years. An equally great culture, philosophically speaking, came to Greece, but faded. Even Rome had a great culture, until the Barbarians punctured the gates. In A.D. 455, the Vandals plundered the city. The empires of Genghis Khan, of Portugal, of Spain, and of Great Britain have also faded in recent memory. They have faded in circumstances not that much different from what's happening today in sections of New York City and Los Angeles. Our culture is going, going, going, gone.

With all the changes that result from the clashes of technologies, from the end of a culture or the passing of millennia, come great opportunities for those who are willing to welcome change and to learn to maneuver around it.

From Stone Tablets to Etching on Atoms

In a recent writing I mentioned briefly a new development in highly compressed data storage. This invention came from the same scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, that gave us the bomb. Now they have moved to civvy street. With all that information rushing into their computers from nuclear installations at a zillion gigabits a second, they needed lots of storage space. So they created their earlier gem -- SERODS (Surface Enhanced Raman Optical Data Storage), a 12-inch disc that can hold one million books. This one disc could replace the $175 million white elephant known as The Vancouver Public Library. That was last week.

Their latest: An information storage technique that can secure computer archival data as far into the future as the Egyptian pyramids protected writings from the past. Two years ago the Los Alamos guys were worrying about their jobs with the scale-down of things nuclear and all that. Now they are back in business.

How can they do this? A CD-ROM is created by etching tiny pits on an extremely-thin coat of aluminum, silver or gold sprayed on a plastic disc. The new process moves to the newer ion micromill a specially modified and focused beam which inscribes data onto such long-lasting material as stainless steel or iridium. Such hard and solid metals are not easily damaged by pounding, don't burn and can resist most chemicals. Because the CD-ROM is made of such materials, phenomena like EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse -- as produced by an atomic bomb) can't erase the material other than by a direct hit. Such eradication would occur instantly with data stored on computer hard-disc drives (which is why some Russian air-borne computers still use old vacuum tubes).

The new process is called sputter-etching. The writing (done only in a vacuum) makes pits by atomic collisions where the ion beam moves. They can do all this in 150-billionth of a metre. It is a game played only in the new field of nanotechnology, where measurements exist only in billionths of a metre. Reading is done through the use of upgraded commercially-available atomic-force microscopes. Developers have applied for patents covering all creative phases of their HD-ROM methods.

Los Alamos scientists can now to store the information equivalent from 12,000 high-density floppy discs (yes, 12,000!) or all the data on 180 currently available CD-ROMs (each capable of holding information equivalent to 1,000 300-page books!) on an invisible one-inch long stainless steel nail made up of just 560 atoms!

As this American laboratory points out, this high-density, read-only device could do wonders for banking institutions, the FBI, NASA and the Library of Congress, which holds 88 million books and other documents.

It doesn't take a nuclear physicist to peek further down the road to see Peter Bronfman and Michael Eisner observing the possibilities for storing images. The result may be production studios under microscopes instead of large buildings of brick and mortar on thousands of acres of dusty California deserts.

Quite a step from stone tablets.