Rude Mechanicals

Growing up, we thought our grandparents had witnessed the most amazing era in human history. Sure, we saw the Moon landing on TV, but we were only ten at the time, and while it was certainly cool, we lacked the experience and understanding — and poetry — to put it in a larger context. Our grandparents had seen biplanes, for chrissake. They knew what the Moon meant.

We would have been old enough to hang out at the pinball arcade when we started having thoughts like that. The place was an ad hoc mechanical museum, not because the proprietor had any taste, but because some machines were cheaper to rent than others.

The old ones had their charms, all bells and spinning scorewheels and worn boards. But the lines formed around new shinies like Captain Fantastic, with electronic sounds and digital numbers. Truly that was the future of quarter-enabled entertainment.

Until the night Pong showed up.

Forget the Moon landing. In our life, because of the timing of our birth, we’ve experienced two Wizard of Oz moments when sepia erupted into Technicolor: The opening scene of Star Wars, and a damn dot bouncing back and forth across a screen. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Buzz.

About five hundred miles south of us, Steve Wozniak and his buddy Steve Jobs were working on one of the successors to Pong, a “colorful” game called Breakout. (They cheated: the colors were provided by a plastic overlay.) The game finally hit the arcades in April 1976, by which time Woz had put his burgeoning skills to work on another project.

Apple Computer was incorporated that April 1. Forty years ago.

Reading about the Lindbergh flight in 1927, could our grandparents have extrapolated that to a Moon landing forty-some years in the future? We certainly couldn’t have imagined a future where Pong ultimately begat the iPhone we’re writing this on, a gadget that is inconceivably more powerful than the computers that guided Apollo 11, and which encapsulates gee-whiz stuff like wireless communication and the Internet itself.

Not to mention ubiquitous porn, of course.

As monumentally symbolic as the Moon landing was, that’s all it was: A symbol. It didn’t affect our lives, unless you count Tang. But the future that Pong heralded and Apple helped enable has so permeated our lives that the post-Millennial generation is being called Digital Natives, kids for whom our own mechanical past might as well be so many biplanes, it’s so distant from their experience.

We still haven’t achieved Jetsons yet, much less Star Trek. But where we once would have thought that the Moon landing marked the end of history, it turns out that history is only beginning.

Presuming, of course, that humanity doesn’t melt the planet first.