I climbed back on the treadmill today for the first time in two weeks. It was a long two weeks, being a bit under the weather, and then traveling to California for a weekend conference, and then four closings in nine days at work. All in all, it didn’t leave much time to work out and it left me not feeling like doing it at all during that stretch.

But, today I finally got back on the horse. Just in time for the Shamrock 8k in three weeks. Hopefully I’ll be ready for it but I’m thinking I won’t be in as good of a position as I was for the Wicked 10k last fall. We’ll see though.

Anyway, while I was running, I had the TV on. I’ve been watching the series “The Eighties”, obviously after watching “The Sixties” and “The Seventies”. Tonight, the episode was “Tech Boom” and focused on how crazy our lives were turned around as computers and microchips and transistors grew at astonishing speeds right before our eyes.

A couple things caught my attention. First, when VCRs were just becoming a huge hit within personal households, they almost went away. I guess because I was only in middle school, I never really noticed there was a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court that could have changed everything. The movie industry, worried about what VCRs would do to ticket sales, took the manufacturers to court over copyright infringement. They were worried about how much they’d lose with individuals recording everything they saw and then passing a bootleg copy to someone else. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision went in favor of the VCR manufacturers and thus, here we are 25 years later with no VCR in sight but falling in love with Netflix and Hulu more and more by the day. Oh, and the movie industry is doing just fine after all these years.

But what if one of those judges went the other way? What if the movie industry had won; then where would we be today? If VCRs didn’t become as prevalent, it’s pretty easy to say there wouldn’t have been such a massive rise in porn, which was the reason VCR sales were booming early on. Seriously, look it up. Having the ability to have that itch scratched without having to go out in public made a huge difference for Sony and its competitors. Then a few years later, what if there were no DVD players to replace VCRs, how would we have watched all those episodes of Friends in the ’90s?

Think about it. How would your life be different if technology from the 1980s hadn’t of caught on? The personal computer. The cell phone. Video games, which now also include all of our streaming needs for TV. Try going a single day without using a technology that didn’t come of age in the decade of Reagan. It may be relaxing for a day or two, but I can’t fathom going much longer without all the conveniences that can be associated with the developments of that era.

Another comment that caught my attention came at the very end of the show. The announcer was talking about computers and where they would lead society. He noted that it could be just a few years down the road before people could have a computer in your pocket, and if we ever got to that point, what would it mean for our online presence? “Right now, getting mail through your computer is becoming more popular, but what if a time comes when you start getting junk mail in your computer? Can you imagine that?”

Can you imagine not having junk emails? Me neither. It’s all fantasy, much like most of this technology was 30 years ago.