Chapter One: On Toronto's, Eglinton Avenue, stands a once- proud 20th-century monument of communications past. The building is seven stories high and a good 100 metres square in area. It was a typical Bell Canada highly automated telephone exchange building. During each of three shifts, 125 employees (375 total) use to direct the nation's domestic and foreign calls to their destinations. Strong union pressure kept the company from making immediate and essential changes to prevent disaster.
Chapter Two: That bulldozer of change has hit the communications field but the Bell building remains as a white elephant relic of the style of thinking in those distant days so long ago. Like 1999.
A cube, 1.5m square and .8m deep have replaced the building. It contains non-electric OPTIC SWITCHES using 1,000 mirrors, each two mm square. These units are stacked 10 X 10 X10 high. The bricks and mortar component of the cube is insignificant. The cube is smarter, faster, and more durable, works 24 hours a day, and makes connections at the speed of light. But this wonder is already obsolete. And it is much too large.
A small camera, in a burnished metallic case, is light and compact enough to fit inside my shirt pocket. The battery, good for taking 500 pictures, looks like half a fat cigarette. The shiny gold microprocessor chips sell for around $250,000 a pound. But the less-than-a-gram weight of my chip is insignificant. The camera is digital from Fuji and itself as light as a feather and three seconds after the picture is taken, you see it in full color. Put it in your computer, send it as e-mail around the world or print out a copy on your color printer (now down to C$100). I've had mine six months. It's now obsolete. What good is a camera that takes only 500 pictures at a crack? The latest camera (model MX-4700) takes 1,000. And has several other new features like a zoom lens and controllable flash. Am I addicted? Do I suffer from technolust? Have you noticed I never once used that four-letter word starting with Film?
In January, 2000, I was in a necropolis, a bronze-age burial cave. The 4,000-years-old cave is in the Spanish town of Pollensa on the romantic island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean, 200 km off the coast of Barcelona.
This cave has been visited over the last century by thousands of people -- archeologist, paleontologists, biologists, and other academics type looking for research to bring fame and fortune. They took a zillion pictures. The pictures captured what they had observed. That was all. I was interested to discover what others there had failed to see.
So I whipped out my trusty Fuji MX-2700 with its. 2.3 million pixels, and shot a few images. With a digital camera, shoot one photo, at the most two, and you've got it right, probably the first time. Then you can chuck the second shot and use that slot again.
I airmailed the pictures to colleague Dal Neitzel of Vidcom Inc. in Bellingham, Washington. He sent back quickly the original picture, but overlaid at two points with two petroglyphs and/or pictographs that had been hidden under the moss, lichens or bacterial action on the cave walls and ceilings. With training from the past, other experts had only looked for what they could see; thinking that no one else could find anything there if they couldn't. Wrong. Worlds unseen, lie all around us. Only our rigid minds restrict us from seeing more.
Dealing with the unknown can be more profitable than dealing with visibles. Much of what has been taught in the past is being proven wrong. Perhaps 85 percent. Schools have been generally regurgitating that which they were brainwashed into believing from their own past. They forgot the time factor.
Change is constant.
