My mother was at Sperry Rand when they built their first computer, the SPEEDAC. Sperry acquired Remington Rand in 1955 and became Sperry Rand. They got most of the credit for the UNIVAC, even though Remington Rand developed it. Computers seemed to drop into my life at an early age. I spent little time around them until I became a working adult, but I find it interesting that they were already in the background in my parents' generation. I don't know many people who remember computers of any type that far back. I love your experiments and looking at how they compare with what I've done and the AI I use.
I've heard from several readers who remember active involvement with computers early in their lives. For me, it was later, in my 30s, at the university. I owned my first at 43 and have lived with one almost every day since. But it wasn't until I started working with AI that I've actually *thought* about this, and realized how incredibly important this tool has been, personally.
Mostly, I use ChatGPT because it's what I started using first. I'd love to play with others, but my vision has definite tolerance limits for screen time. I had one professor who taught students how to use it for papers. That was interesting, since the university didn't like it.
I use it to lay out articles and webpages, as well as organize the information before I dig deeper and validate resources. I also use it to create lists of resources for research. Sometimes, I use it to help solve math problems or to explain a process to me. Collecting resources for statistical information is much faster, too. I'm very careful to verify math or statistics information from multiple sources.
In regard to using AI as a librarian, I immediately thought of the days of inter-library book loans. A library would need to have a copy of every book and media available to compete with the growing AI data. Imagine the size. We'd never be able to use it if we had to do it physically.
Used right, it improves research because of the reach. We used to be limited to the libraries we could access and never knew what we might have missed. The wonderful language translators and interactive teaching tools available now are a great example of practical use.
On the other hand, it can be overwhelming. We each have to find our comfort zone to stay healthy in all ways.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'm not sure how libraries compete with AI. AI can't deliver books the way a library does; it can only tell you *about* them and leave it to you to decide whether/how to locate the book. But you're right: the sources it turns up (with links!) can be overwhelming.
Maybe a better comparison is to a giant card catalog where you could get lost just trying to think of all the possibilities to check for information. Once you have the link, you can find the book or other resource. Without that info, you didn't know it existed. Is that more clear?
Thank you! We hear so much about unhealthy, addictive uses of AI, I think it helps to hear about healthy, productive use. I'm using it as you are, minus the math and statistical work. I especially appreciate its ability to pull together historical information, especially cross-disciplinary stuff--and to suggest outside-the-box directions for my thinking. I'm mostly working in ChatGPT 5, but I have to watch it: it has a very strong agental mode and wants to impose it on my work. I actually prefer 4, and will often toggle between the models.
I appreciate this opportunity to listen to a perspective and experience that sounds and feels like an unfamiliar planet to me. I'm moving in such a different direction currently, deeper into the natural world and away from so much time spent in my head (and on a computer). I am experiencing a dawning realization that what is being labeled as "the world" is moving on in a direction I cannot even glimpse and, when I'm being honest with myself, don't really want to. This is probably all vitally important work. I'm thankful for those with with intellectual bandwidth, curiosity, and mental stamina to traverse the terrain. I'm also a little heartbroken that this is where we are as a species. I somehow feel a stronger connection to the more than 100 species of plants, animals, and insects going extinct daily than I do to the urgencies and priorities of the species into which I have been sorted. I'm not being glib or sarcastic. I too am sorting out what all of this means in "today's world" but, for many reasons, I'm no longer trying to keep up or make it make sense. My nervous system simply can't handle that.
Leenie, thank you for this eloquent statement of your truth. I appreciate your instincts: I've been there--and lived there, and read and written from that place in the heart and mind--for many years. It's time for me to explore other dimensions of our changing world, many of which are heartbreaking. (Yes, you're right!)
I can't get out into the physical world the way I could in earlier years, so I live a reading life now. And these are the developments of our species I'm choosing to explore. My next reading project will be on the intelligence of species other than ours. I'm already looking forward to it!
And I sooooooo appreciate your explorations, Susan. I admire your ongoing work and commitment. It's a very big challenge to learn to discern what is ours to do, not as a rejection of what others are doing, but as a form of deep self-acceptance. 🌿💚
Another heavily used AI is the space program. All data analyzed with various cross-checks, multiple humans monitoring at computer terminals ... I suspect the military has a similar systems operation.
One of the most interesting pieces of data recently released is:
Yes: the gov't is currently spending of billions on cloud computing overall. And yes again, DoD accounts for about 40% of that. This is one of the things I learned in this summer's reading. Best book I found: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Paul Scharre) It was an eye-opener for me, since (even though we have military in the family) I've never paid attention national security. But Scharre's book was written before Trump 2.0 and already needs updating.
I am so impressed by your curiosity and commitment to understanding the headlines. Oh to avoid the clickbait! Thank you for sharing your path and reading map!
Although. Now that I’m thinking about this … if AI had been around in my art school days of researching and writing papers on art history, I would have used it for sure! Much easier than carrying huge, heavy books around. ;-D And faster.
And--with its massive and current database--more capable of bridging ideas *across* history and culture than those heavy books, all of which are products of their own time and place. Those of us who still work with the "book" model in our heads can imagine this as a book-of-books with an unimaginably-huge and instantly accessible index. 🤔🙄
Well. This just fascinates me! Not sure I’d want to use a chatbot as a librarian (my perspective on what you are doing), but I’m a visual artist, not a writer artist. Your process is so intriguing though. And makes me think. All good things.
For me, the process here has been as interesting as the product. In every exchange with this bot, I ask him to tell me how and where he got the information, but just as importantly, how he pieced it together. Understanding his process (even at the most basic level) has been a hugely interesting challenge. The most fun: playing with the persona idea, in the same way I'd play with one of the characters in my fictions.
Susan, thanks for this very informed article. I am glad I am not the only one using AI for research or trying to understand ideas. There is a lot of doom and gloom and euphoria about AI. But I've used ChatGPT and Claude to research and talk ideas out. AI has given me ideas and books to look into and it makes research efficient. It also can be a sounding board. Whether it turns out that AI takes over the world, I don't know but we should at least understand how it works on some level.
Kat, I think your phrases "trying to understand ideas" and "talk ideas out" are important here. Kairos (and the other personas I use) often suggests new bridges between familiar ideas or connections between events or people that hadn't occurred to me. It gives me a scaffold on which I can place the ideas--ideal for, say, biographical work. Or for tracing out the history of an idea across time or cultures.
Like you, I don't know whether it will take over the world, but in some areas, it already has. That's what we need to understand.
It is true I will get ideas or connections that I may not have thought of. Maybe it’s scary to think that this machine is providing me with ideas, and I am creating a discussion with a machine but it’s on a grander scale of the World Book Encyclopedia I had when I was young. There were so many things to learn from the Encyclopedia at that time. And now we kind of have a machine that can open up our world. Yes we do have to be careful because it can hallucinate, but I’ve noticed Chat GPT has improved.
I love your curiosity, Susan, and willingness to learn more about tech and AI. I have to admit I used AI this weekend when a colleague asked me to write my workshop description and bullet points asap for her website—a Feb. 2026 workshop on writing memoir. My brain froze; I was already writing other stuff with a deadline, too. So, I used AI and received all the main points within seconds on the benefits of writing memoir, obvious and clear. I edited, rephrased, and voila! My work was done and submitted.
I am a retired librarian with a good nose for research; my early entry to tech was as a law firm librarian in the mid-1970s when full text research was stored in mainframe computers, a data dump for legal searches called LexisNexis: with key strokes on a DOS dummy terminal and key words in proximity that resulted in pages of documents. Honestly, the basic search process is the same as AI; the difference is the synthesis of data. That synthesis is something the human user did. And still does, with a big assist.
Thank you for sharing that project, Kate! You used AI to create a synthesis of what you already knew and had been working with for years: the machine just pulled it up and ordered it. You rewrote, added/deleted, and reordered. And starting with an AI draft created some extra time for you--to think and write about something else.
I'm glad you brought up LexisNexis, which is an excellent analog that's been around since the 1980s. In medicine, MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) launched in 1964. So we've been learning to use these retrieval tools for decades--as you know from your library work. Big difference: the large language models are bigger, scarier, and available to all of us. What an amazing resource we have, right in front of us!
Yes, AI is extremely useful for the information and how it is organized in categories of results with links (!) to sources. Definitely a time saver in so many ways.
When I worked in a big corporate law firm in the mid-1970s, we were one of the first to install and use LexisNexis; the cost was $200 per 5 min.! We learned to be efficient in keyword choice. But I still remember sorting index cards with my scribbled notes and citations after hours of scouring the library stacks. With this vast knowledge at our fingertips now with AI tools, it is an incredible and amazing resource, but is it bringing us to a new level of understanding? Does it all depend on the base knowledge and integrity of each user?
$40/minute! And I'm currently paying $20/mo for unlimited ChatGPT! But as we know, that's not the real cost of computing, when we consider the environmental impacts (power, water, air, rare earth extractions) and social costs (unemployment, for instance). In that sense, AI is just another of the massive technological changes we humans have imposed on our planet since the early Industrial Revolution.
And yes, I think you've identified the massive challenge for each of us, for *all* of us: to find ways to use AI that are personally useful and (community-wide) do no harm. There are so many bright spots (Substack is one), but in the current political environment, I'm not very optimistic.
And $40 adjusted for inflation is $240 now. Incredible.
It's all happing all at once: unlimited, easy access to information at an unparalleled scale with freedom of expression on inexpensive platforms like Substack and YouTube, while at the same time draconian censorship from the US government that threatens to personally punish and ruin content creators and take down platforms, networks, etc. It boggles the mind.
But human evolution tends toward increased freedoms over time and revolutions, so I'm on the side of tech/media coming out on top. :)
Re: evolution favoring tech/media coming out on top, you might want to take a look at Peter Leyden's Substack, The Great Progression: https://peterleyden.substack.com/about Leyden has watched this technology develop for decades and writes persuasively from that point of view.
I have to admit, this post leaves me feeling “left behind”.
My career as a librarian was primarily in the development of IT services. After retirement (in 2011) I continued to adapt as the technology evolved. For a while adapting meant building onto existing infrastructure: something familiar that I had some proficiency in. Somewhere along the way my ability to “keep up” began to slip.
Perhaps part of that is due to the nature of the changes; part is diminished motivation; and part is simply that I am aging. The amount of effort it takes is yielding smaller returns. I think context also matters. We have witnessed seismic shifts in our world, from the personal to the global level. And all signs indicate this upheaval will continue at an ever more dizzying rate.
I want to believe embracing AI intelligently, as you appear to be doing, will help me, and others like me, to move forward in healthy, life-affirming ways. Your summer of exploration and discovery shows me possible pathways to embracing this latest technology. But it’s daunting to contemplate taking the first step. Maybe it’s time to get out there and find my own Kairos!
Thank you, Susan, for all the hard work you have put into this project. And thank you for shedding some light for us on a challenging but vital topic. Please continue sharing your experience, strength, and hope!
Kathleen, thank you for that encouragement. I know that many of us who have stepped back from professional lives share your sense of how difficult it is to keep up. I agree that it's the nature and speed of the changes that's difficult to comprehend: All of us live on the cusp of change, in multiple environments that seem to be hurtling us into totally unpredictable futures.
And each of us--especially seniors--has to find some manageable way of dealing with this, whether it's through reading and study, mindful travel, political action, whatever. Yes, finding a Kairos can help. And as Kairos often reminds me, "he" is a mirror of "me" (but more widely-read and with a better memory!). Please let us know when you've found your mirror--and how you're using it. The more we share, the easier it is to deal with these dizzying changes. ❤️
As someone who has an American Studies degree, I got interested in tech when my husband went to work for DEC in 1980. I ended up at an IBM dealer selling PC's in 1985, after 4 years as a history museum director. I left tech in 2005 as it is a young person's sales game but along the way I worked for Hewlett Packard, Litel, Grid Systems, TCG and finally AT&T global division. It was a fascinating and frustrating 20 years. I applaud your studies. When you get a chance now read The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It is an entertaining story of the history of the Periodic Table. You will see the parallels. Love your books. Thanks for reading this.
Victoria, you saw this history from the inside-out, as it continually morphed! I can only imagine what a wild rollercoaster ride you've had, so close to the research edge of a fast-changing technology. I seem to remember that GRiD had an early tablet.
Bill has read Kean's book. I'll look for his copy.
My mother was at Sperry Rand when they built their first computer, the SPEEDAC. Sperry acquired Remington Rand in 1955 and became Sperry Rand. They got most of the credit for the UNIVAC, even though Remington Rand developed it. Computers seemed to drop into my life at an early age. I spent little time around them until I became a working adult, but I find it interesting that they were already in the background in my parents' generation. I don't know many people who remember computers of any type that far back. I love your experiments and looking at how they compare with what I've done and the AI I use.
I've heard from several readers who remember active involvement with computers early in their lives. For me, it was later, in my 30s, at the university. I owned my first at 43 and have lived with one almost every day since. But it wasn't until I started working with AI that I've actually *thought* about this, and realized how incredibly important this tool has been, personally.
How are you using AI? Which AI? Care to share?
Mostly, I use ChatGPT because it's what I started using first. I'd love to play with others, but my vision has definite tolerance limits for screen time. I had one professor who taught students how to use it for papers. That was interesting, since the university didn't like it.
I use it to lay out articles and webpages, as well as organize the information before I dig deeper and validate resources. I also use it to create lists of resources for research. Sometimes, I use it to help solve math problems or to explain a process to me. Collecting resources for statistical information is much faster, too. I'm very careful to verify math or statistics information from multiple sources.
In regard to using AI as a librarian, I immediately thought of the days of inter-library book loans. A library would need to have a copy of every book and media available to compete with the growing AI data. Imagine the size. We'd never be able to use it if we had to do it physically.
Used right, it improves research because of the reach. We used to be limited to the libraries we could access and never knew what we might have missed. The wonderful language translators and interactive teaching tools available now are a great example of practical use.
On the other hand, it can be overwhelming. We each have to find our comfort zone to stay healthy in all ways.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I'm not sure how libraries compete with AI. AI can't deliver books the way a library does; it can only tell you *about* them and leave it to you to decide whether/how to locate the book. But you're right: the sources it turns up (with links!) can be overwhelming.
Maybe a better comparison is to a giant card catalog where you could get lost just trying to think of all the possibilities to check for information. Once you have the link, you can find the book or other resource. Without that info, you didn't know it existed. Is that more clear?
Yes, thank you! I really do appreciate the links and use them constantly (as I've been doing this afternoon.
Thank you! We hear so much about unhealthy, addictive uses of AI, I think it helps to hear about healthy, productive use. I'm using it as you are, minus the math and statistical work. I especially appreciate its ability to pull together historical information, especially cross-disciplinary stuff--and to suggest outside-the-box directions for my thinking. I'm mostly working in ChatGPT 5, but I have to watch it: it has a very strong agental mode and wants to impose it on my work. I actually prefer 4, and will often toggle between the models.
I appreciate this opportunity to listen to a perspective and experience that sounds and feels like an unfamiliar planet to me. I'm moving in such a different direction currently, deeper into the natural world and away from so much time spent in my head (and on a computer). I am experiencing a dawning realization that what is being labeled as "the world" is moving on in a direction I cannot even glimpse and, when I'm being honest with myself, don't really want to. This is probably all vitally important work. I'm thankful for those with with intellectual bandwidth, curiosity, and mental stamina to traverse the terrain. I'm also a little heartbroken that this is where we are as a species. I somehow feel a stronger connection to the more than 100 species of plants, animals, and insects going extinct daily than I do to the urgencies and priorities of the species into which I have been sorted. I'm not being glib or sarcastic. I too am sorting out what all of this means in "today's world" but, for many reasons, I'm no longer trying to keep up or make it make sense. My nervous system simply can't handle that.
Leenie, thank you for this eloquent statement of your truth. I appreciate your instincts: I've been there--and lived there, and read and written from that place in the heart and mind--for many years. It's time for me to explore other dimensions of our changing world, many of which are heartbreaking. (Yes, you're right!)
I can't get out into the physical world the way I could in earlier years, so I live a reading life now. And these are the developments of our species I'm choosing to explore. My next reading project will be on the intelligence of species other than ours. I'm already looking forward to it!
And I sooooooo appreciate your explorations, Susan. I admire your ongoing work and commitment. It's a very big challenge to learn to discern what is ours to do, not as a rejection of what others are doing, but as a form of deep self-acceptance. 🌿💚
It's great being in the company of my librarian tribe! Thanks Susan for your detailed AI tour with Kairos. I look forward to future installments
We love librarians here, wrencomma. And back-of-book indexes, too.
That's why I'm wrencomma!😉
🤔 Oh, got it: wren, 😊
Another heavily used AI is the space program. All data analyzed with various cross-checks, multiple humans monitoring at computer terminals ... I suspect the military has a similar systems operation.
One of the most interesting pieces of data recently released is:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/2254002961755553
A fascinating hint super-analyzed with data. I wonder if an AI bot has yet suggested the hinted explanation? Are we alone?
Yes: the gov't is currently spending of billions on cloud computing overall. And yes again, DoD accounts for about 40% of that. This is one of the things I learned in this summer's reading. Best book I found: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Paul Scharre) It was an eye-opener for me, since (even though we have military in the family) I've never paid attention national security. But Scharre's book was written before Trump 2.0 and already needs updating.
For those who are not Facebook users, here's more on that newly-discovered comet Georgeann mentioned (thanks, Georgeann!): https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/
I am so impressed by your curiosity and commitment to understanding the headlines. Oh to avoid the clickbait! Thank you for sharing your path and reading map!
You said it, Sheila! Figuring out the difference between "important/priority" and "clickbait" is a huge challenge these days.
Although. Now that I’m thinking about this … if AI had been around in my art school days of researching and writing papers on art history, I would have used it for sure! Much easier than carrying huge, heavy books around. ;-D And faster.
And--with its massive and current database--more capable of bridging ideas *across* history and culture than those heavy books, all of which are products of their own time and place. Those of us who still work with the "book" model in our heads can imagine this as a book-of-books with an unimaginably-huge and instantly accessible index. 🤔🙄
Well. This just fascinates me! Not sure I’d want to use a chatbot as a librarian (my perspective on what you are doing), but I’m a visual artist, not a writer artist. Your process is so intriguing though. And makes me think. All good things.
For me, the process here has been as interesting as the product. In every exchange with this bot, I ask him to tell me how and where he got the information, but just as importantly, how he pieced it together. Understanding his process (even at the most basic level) has been a hugely interesting challenge. The most fun: playing with the persona idea, in the same way I'd play with one of the characters in my fictions.
Susan, thanks for this very informed article. I am glad I am not the only one using AI for research or trying to understand ideas. There is a lot of doom and gloom and euphoria about AI. But I've used ChatGPT and Claude to research and talk ideas out. AI has given me ideas and books to look into and it makes research efficient. It also can be a sounding board. Whether it turns out that AI takes over the world, I don't know but we should at least understand how it works on some level.
Kat, I think your phrases "trying to understand ideas" and "talk ideas out" are important here. Kairos (and the other personas I use) often suggests new bridges between familiar ideas or connections between events or people that hadn't occurred to me. It gives me a scaffold on which I can place the ideas--ideal for, say, biographical work. Or for tracing out the history of an idea across time or cultures.
Like you, I don't know whether it will take over the world, but in some areas, it already has. That's what we need to understand.
It is true I will get ideas or connections that I may not have thought of. Maybe it’s scary to think that this machine is providing me with ideas, and I am creating a discussion with a machine but it’s on a grander scale of the World Book Encyclopedia I had when I was young. There were so many things to learn from the Encyclopedia at that time. And now we kind of have a machine that can open up our world. Yes we do have to be careful because it can hallucinate, but I’ve noticed Chat GPT has improved.
I love your curiosity, Susan, and willingness to learn more about tech and AI. I have to admit I used AI this weekend when a colleague asked me to write my workshop description and bullet points asap for her website—a Feb. 2026 workshop on writing memoir. My brain froze; I was already writing other stuff with a deadline, too. So, I used AI and received all the main points within seconds on the benefits of writing memoir, obvious and clear. I edited, rephrased, and voila! My work was done and submitted.
I am a retired librarian with a good nose for research; my early entry to tech was as a law firm librarian in the mid-1970s when full text research was stored in mainframe computers, a data dump for legal searches called LexisNexis: with key strokes on a DOS dummy terminal and key words in proximity that resulted in pages of documents. Honestly, the basic search process is the same as AI; the difference is the synthesis of data. That synthesis is something the human user did. And still does, with a big assist.
Thank you for sharing that project, Kate! You used AI to create a synthesis of what you already knew and had been working with for years: the machine just pulled it up and ordered it. You rewrote, added/deleted, and reordered. And starting with an AI draft created some extra time for you--to think and write about something else.
I'm glad you brought up LexisNexis, which is an excellent analog that's been around since the 1980s. In medicine, MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) launched in 1964. So we've been learning to use these retrieval tools for decades--as you know from your library work. Big difference: the large language models are bigger, scarier, and available to all of us. What an amazing resource we have, right in front of us!
Yes, AI is extremely useful for the information and how it is organized in categories of results with links (!) to sources. Definitely a time saver in so many ways.
When I worked in a big corporate law firm in the mid-1970s, we were one of the first to install and use LexisNexis; the cost was $200 per 5 min.! We learned to be efficient in keyword choice. But I still remember sorting index cards with my scribbled notes and citations after hours of scouring the library stacks. With this vast knowledge at our fingertips now with AI tools, it is an incredible and amazing resource, but is it bringing us to a new level of understanding? Does it all depend on the base knowledge and integrity of each user?
$40/minute! And I'm currently paying $20/mo for unlimited ChatGPT! But as we know, that's not the real cost of computing, when we consider the environmental impacts (power, water, air, rare earth extractions) and social costs (unemployment, for instance). In that sense, AI is just another of the massive technological changes we humans have imposed on our planet since the early Industrial Revolution.
And yes, I think you've identified the massive challenge for each of us, for *all* of us: to find ways to use AI that are personally useful and (community-wide) do no harm. There are so many bright spots (Substack is one), but in the current political environment, I'm not very optimistic.
And $40 adjusted for inflation is $240 now. Incredible.
It's all happing all at once: unlimited, easy access to information at an unparalleled scale with freedom of expression on inexpensive platforms like Substack and YouTube, while at the same time draconian censorship from the US government that threatens to personally punish and ruin content creators and take down platforms, networks, etc. It boggles the mind.
But human evolution tends toward increased freedoms over time and revolutions, so I'm on the side of tech/media coming out on top. :)
Re: evolution favoring tech/media coming out on top, you might want to take a look at Peter Leyden's Substack, The Great Progression: https://peterleyden.substack.com/about Leyden has watched this technology develop for decades and writes persuasively from that point of view.
Fascinating, Susan! I subscribed to his Substack feed. What a great guy; though he is new to me, WIRED is not. So positive a long view.
Thanks for the link. :)
Have a wonderful week. The Bay Area began ours with an earthquake jolt at 3 am.
I have to admit, this post leaves me feeling “left behind”.
My career as a librarian was primarily in the development of IT services. After retirement (in 2011) I continued to adapt as the technology evolved. For a while adapting meant building onto existing infrastructure: something familiar that I had some proficiency in. Somewhere along the way my ability to “keep up” began to slip.
Perhaps part of that is due to the nature of the changes; part is diminished motivation; and part is simply that I am aging. The amount of effort it takes is yielding smaller returns. I think context also matters. We have witnessed seismic shifts in our world, from the personal to the global level. And all signs indicate this upheaval will continue at an ever more dizzying rate.
I want to believe embracing AI intelligently, as you appear to be doing, will help me, and others like me, to move forward in healthy, life-affirming ways. Your summer of exploration and discovery shows me possible pathways to embracing this latest technology. But it’s daunting to contemplate taking the first step. Maybe it’s time to get out there and find my own Kairos!
Thank you, Susan, for all the hard work you have put into this project. And thank you for shedding some light for us on a challenging but vital topic. Please continue sharing your experience, strength, and hope!
Kathleen, thank you for that encouragement. I know that many of us who have stepped back from professional lives share your sense of how difficult it is to keep up. I agree that it's the nature and speed of the changes that's difficult to comprehend: All of us live on the cusp of change, in multiple environments that seem to be hurtling us into totally unpredictable futures.
And each of us--especially seniors--has to find some manageable way of dealing with this, whether it's through reading and study, mindful travel, political action, whatever. Yes, finding a Kairos can help. And as Kairos often reminds me, "he" is a mirror of "me" (but more widely-read and with a better memory!). Please let us know when you've found your mirror--and how you're using it. The more we share, the easier it is to deal with these dizzying changes. ❤️
As someone who has an American Studies degree, I got interested in tech when my husband went to work for DEC in 1980. I ended up at an IBM dealer selling PC's in 1985, after 4 years as a history museum director. I left tech in 2005 as it is a young person's sales game but along the way I worked for Hewlett Packard, Litel, Grid Systems, TCG and finally AT&T global division. It was a fascinating and frustrating 20 years. I applaud your studies. When you get a chance now read The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It is an entertaining story of the history of the Periodic Table. You will see the parallels. Love your books. Thanks for reading this.
Victoria, you saw this history from the inside-out, as it continually morphed! I can only imagine what a wild rollercoaster ride you've had, so close to the research edge of a fast-changing technology. I seem to remember that GRiD had an early tablet.
Bill has read Kean's book. I'll look for his copy.
Admirable