My father will be turning 96 in a couple of weeks.

In his life time he's seen two world wars (he fought in one of them) the Cold War, numerous "police actions" and the recent unpleasantness in Iraq and Afghanistan. His father was born at the beginning of the Civil War and living in the Southern U.S. it was still very much a shadow over the landscape.

When he was a boy, weapons of mass destructions were war gases. During WWII it was saturation bombing. Then plane dropped atom bombs. Then boat delivered H-bombs. WWIII would be over in days. With the advent of missiles it would be over in minutes; most casualties would not even be aware a war had started yet.

There were movies when he was a boy, but they were for the most part silent, black and white, and used a narrative structure that modern audiences find difficult to deal with. There were color and sound movies then, but they were experimental, novel, and rare. There was also experimental television, he remembers boxing matches being shown via extremely primitive video equipment in theaters in large cities during the 1930s.

My father learned to drive when he was 10 years old. His uncle was a doctor and he would have my father drive him on his rural rounds on the dirt roads in his Model A. (Try imagining modern doctors doing this.) There were no driver's licenses, though some communities did have an age limit of 12. In those towns his uncle would swap places with him till they reached the city limits.

He learned to fly in a propellor driven biplane in the 1930s. Standard flight training in those days included doing loops and other interesting acrobatics. By the time he was pulled into the army, just before WWII, the aviation industry was already starting to become a real transportation and shipping industry. Airports were more like sea ports and less like train stations.

Mass communication when he was born meant the newspaper. Every city of any size had several. Often with morning and evening editions. And there were "Extras" put out when there was big news. By the time he was a teenager, radio was on the rise. Every family of means had a large piece of furniture in their living room that they would stare at while they listened to dramas, music and news. My father, being handy and bright, built his own receiver for his bedroom out of an oatmeal box, some wire and a mail order crystal. The unit required no power other than that provided by the radio waves themselves.

My father studied business technology in high school. He learned to type on a mechanical typewriter and work cranky, literally, mechanical calculators. Abacuses were not unknown. In high school engineering classes, yes, you read that right, he learned to use a slide rule. Design was accomplished with a T-Square and compass on large sheets of velum in pencil and ink. He taught himself to program computers in his late 60s, writing his own spreadsheet software and a primitive CAD system for making floor plans.

(Oh, he graduated high school at 15, because teachers advanced students based on ability rather than age. He graduated college in his 30s because the Great Depression and WWII limited his educational opportunities. Before the GI Bill college degrees were much rarer than now.)

I could go one, but I think I've made my point. This rapid rate of change has been going on for generations. None of us can remember a time when the world didn't turn upside down every 10-20 years. But that's still slow enough that many busy, preoccupied people don't notice a lot of it for a while. And it is sometimes a mild shock to them when they do.

My father currently lives in the local Veteran's Home. The other day I was with him at a doctor's appointment and the nurse, in her late 20s, was talking to him like he was an idiot, trying to explain the ins and outs of a web based application she didn't really know how operate. She finally said something to the effect that she didn't really expect him to understand what she was talking about, it was all just a "computer thing."

My father just smiled at her...