Crossroads

I seem to have a knack for finding myself at crossroads in time. Mere coincidence no doubt, mostly due to when I was born, but rather intriguing nonetheless when taken as a whole.

I spent my childhood in France, my family having moved there when I was 5, in 1969. This was only one year after the tumult of the 1968 student revolution, which led to sweeping changes in the French educational system. These changes were not yet really in place and I went to a school in an older area, so was one of the last entering classes to experience the old system. I wore a blouse of sorts ("tablier") over my clothes in school, to keep them clean. This was necessary of course because we wrote with a quill, the steel kind that you dip in an inkwell every line or so. The teacher would come by with a big jug-o-ink and fill you up when you ran out. Corporal punishment was standard as was public berating and humiliation by the teacher. Pink Floyd's "We don't need no education" resonates with me in a most profound way. Of course we never spoke in class without first raising our hands. My male classmates wore shorts year-round. While the Paris area isn't exactly Fargo, North Dakota in winter, it isn't exactly Miami either. We had months of low-40s rain and some freezing temperatures too. No matter, the little blue-legged boys would run around me in my big, warm, American clothes. I'll blog about how always being a weirdo freak scarred me some other time.

France was coming out of the old post-war era, but still was very old-world in many ways. For example, indoor plumbing was not universal out in the country where I lived. Some people would still wash their clothes in the public outdoor wash-buildings "lavoires" and you could see them haul water in Jerry cans. Water in the cities was in fact not always safe, which was the original reason for bottled water, which later became a fad in the the U.S. and is still with us today. Most houses didn't have showers and little old ladies in black would would be seen walking around town doing their groceries and going to church.

I grew up near a woods in which there was still a rusting German rail-gun and lots and lots of bomb-crater ponds. I grew up in the shadow of The War (WWII, although older people used that term to refer to WWI). Many of my friends' parents had fought in the war or in the post-war wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria. I grew up on a diet of war stories from my best friend's Dad who was a real war hero, having served as a scout in a French unit attached to a British division. They would go into northern France and scout out German positions. He was strafed once by a British "Mosquito" fighter plane who mistook his squad for a German one. Wearing the British summer uniform of shorts, they dove into a nettle patch to escape.

I really feel now that I grew up between worlds: the old post-war France one sees in the movies and the new France that is fully developed and modern.

My childhood took place in the 70s. As a result, I came of age right at the end of the counter-cultural movement of the 60s and 70s. I grew up listening to the music of that era, and hearing the stories of sex, drugs and rock and roll, only to come of age (back in the U.S.) to Reagan, the preppy movement, Young Republicans and a lot of bad music. I never saw all the drugs and sex I had grown up hearing about, I felt downright cheated.

I already mentioned in a previous blog that when I discovered the world of computers, it was right exactly at the crossroads between the old heroic days of the mainframe and the beginning of the modern era of computing, ushered in by the PC. I was a freshman in 1982 when the PC was invented. So I never actually read a core dump in hex, but I still took COBOL and assembly-language classes.

I pursued a career in science, Physics specifically. When I graduated in 1994 with my PhD, I discovered that the end of the Cold War had resulted in a very sharp decrease in the perceived need for basic research. No one was hiring Physicists. I graduated just in time to witness the end of a certain kind of heroic era of Big Science (think Apollo project). Oh well.

Right when I was graduating, the old Soviet empire was falling apart. In our lab we got a bunch of really great Russian equipment (and scientists) for cents on the dollar. It also felt like I was coming of age at the transition betwen the old Cold War-dominated world and the global political reality in which we now live with the U.S. as the only global superpower (for now... did someone say China?).

Right out of school (1997, I went back for another degree), I hired into IBM, at a time when it was changing from the old mainframe and hardware-dominated company it had become huge with, into the new software and services behemoth it is now. This transition meant a decreased emphasis on R&D and internal development, ultimately resulting in me losing my job there. It also very much felt like the passing of the era of Big Blue when that meant something heroically uncompromising. Many companies went through that transition which is at least somewhat sad.

So here I am now in Austin, Texas. Although I am told that Austin has been changing rapidly for a long time, it now also feels to me like it is on the cusp of really becoming a new Silicon Valley, of entering a new phase of even faster development. We'll see, it is usually hard to tell these things until after the fact.

I guess all eras are crossroads of some sort or another, few things remain unchanged in our world for very long. It's likely that someone 10 or 20 years younger or older could present a similar story with different events, but this is mine.