Being the First

It’s great being the one of first ones to do something. In the 50s, everyone knew the first family to get a television. In the 60s, it was the first family to get a colour television, even though the colour was pretty bad in those days.

Being one of the first to do or get something can be pretty lonely. Consider this.

If you were the first person to get a telephone in your neighbourhood, whom would you call?

Think if you were one of the first people to get the invention called the radio. In the beginning there weren’t many programs or stations to choose from.

Television was the same. If you were one of the first ones to get a colour TV, most of the shows were not in colour. Remember the NBC peacock? It was put at the beginning of a program to indicate that it was in colour.

When I was in London, England, I worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was there I saw my first facsimile machine or fax. It reproduced low-resolution images and text. It took many minutes for the page to be completed. At that time, not many people had fax machines, so if you had one, there were few people you could send one to. By the 90s, everybody seemed to have one and couldn’t survive without one. Technology has advanced so they are seldom used any more. When was the last time you sent a fax?

I had an email address before 1990. My office was at Carleton University and I signed up for something called Freenet, which used something called the Internet. I still remember my account number. It was ac474. Since Carleton had one of the first Freenets in Canada, it meant that I was one of the first few thousands of people to have an email account. Do you know what my problem was? I didn’t have anybody to send email to. Nobody I knew had an email address. Just like all other technology, it was only a matter of time before almost everybody was connected.

There was one great advantage of the early days. I didn’t get any junk mail. Spam was non-existent. Considering that 90% of my emails are undesirable, I sometimes long for the good old days.

Even computers have changed. I remember the big old floppy disks. Suddenly we got the smaller diskettes. The problem was if you wanted to transfer data from one machine to another. Now they don’t sell computers with anything that will accept disks. My guess is that in the next few years the CD will bite the dust.

If you come up with some brilliant idea, don’t be alarmed if “nobody else is doing it.” Just like these other great inventions, you might be ahead of your time. Sure you might be alone for a while, but there can only be one leader. So stay with your convictions and wait for everybody else to catch up. Don’t feel embarrassed or worried if you are all by yourself.