Andy Chase

I’m often struck by the strange position of my generation with regards to the rise of personal computing; there seems to be a pretty even split between people my age who were exposed to computers as kids and irrevocably hooked, and people whose only exposure to computers is the aging MS-DOS or mainframe enterprise software they have to put up with at work; they don’t “know computers” so much as they know to hit F5 3 times, then TAB, then ENTER in order to create a new transaction.

I’m in the former camp, having spent much of my childhood in front of a Commodore 64. As rapidly as home computer technology has advanced over the last 20 years it’s easy to forget how amazing the Commodore 64 and Apple ][ were at the time.

It’s also hard to imagine being a kid now, growing up with the current hardware and software that’s out there… and it’s staggering to look at the Commodore 64 then and PC/Macintosh computers now, and try to imagine what kids will be growing up with 20 years from now.

Case in point, Apple’s GarageBand. Last night, using software that comes free with Macintosh computers, I was able to record myself playing three different instruments, and mix three tracks into a single master. A digital master – I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to record stuff on analog tape and watch the sound become progressively poorer as you attempt to mix and dub it into a finished track.

(How utterly cool is it that Apple saw fit to throw in instrument icons for Banjo and Mandolin, which are probably two of the intstruments that are least-commonly recorded by GarageBand users?)

The home-recording-studio-for-$500 is impressive enough by itself, but the next part is pretty mind-blowing, too if you make yourself think back to the days before broadband, graphical web browsers, and WinAmp:

Using Audacity, a free audio-editing application, I was able to clean up my recording a little bit and compress my CD-quality home recording into a file format small enough to post on my web site where pretty much anyone on the planet can listen to it, including you:

Worried Man (959K, 160Kbps MP3)

I won’t even get into PayPal or the iTunes Music Store as ways to make money from my self-produced recordings if I ever become good enough that people might actually pay to hear them.

I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been breathlessly said by hundreds of other people already – but every once in a while I am struck by just how much has changed in my lifetime, and a little unsettled by how quickly it’s taken for granted. (Who are these people who complain that iPods are too big ?! It’s the size of a deck of cards, it holds all of the music you own, and it’s too big?)

I think it’s important to step back once in a while and acknowledge that a lot of this everyday stuff would have been science fiction if it had been described to you when you were 10 years old.