Do You Know What This Is? I didn`t!
An obsolete IBM template, a family gift, and a reminder that technology ages faster than people do
During a recent video call, my brother-in-law showed me something I had never seen before.
Their son works in the recycling business and had come across an old IBM flowcharting template, the kind his father used when he began his professional life as a computer programmer in the 1970s.
Its symbols belong to another technological age: punched cards, magnetic tape, manual input, and something rather ominously called a “terminal interrupt.” An artifact from the early art of computing. My brother-in-law was chuffed.
This family story has something wonderfully circular about it. A son working in recycling rescues an object from the past and gives it to his father: an object that reconnects the older man with the young programmer he once was. As I listened to him explain the template, I realized that this was more than a coder’s relic. It was recognition.
We often talk about aging in the language of obsolescence. Skills become outdated. Industries move on. Younger people arrive carrying tools we may not understand. What was once cutting-edge becomes a curiosity or ends up in the recycling pile. Technology can become obsolete. People need not.
The tools my brother-in-law first used have disappeared, but the mind they helped shape has not: the ability to analyze a problem, follow its logic, make decisions, and find another route when the first one fails.
Now in his seventies, my brother-in-law is defying the Red Zone, the long period of decline many experience and fear. He walks long distances, stays socially active, and stays closely engaged with every generation of his family. Since his supposed retirement, he has kept adapting and reinventing himself. He now holds elected office in his community, a responsibility that puts him face to face with people and calls on him to listen, care, support, and help preserve the everyday courtesies and shared culture that let everyone flourish.
Perhaps a long life is less like a straight line and more like one of those early flowcharts: full of decisions, diversions, loops, fresh inputs and unexpected connections.
The machinery changes. The program evolves. But the person remains in the system: connected, contributing and still helping to shape what comes next.
My brother-in-law began his professional life writing code for machines. Today, he helps sustain the unwritten code of community: decency, courtesy, responsibility and belonging. That, too, is an art form. And it never becomes obsolete.
For more reflections on aging, longevity, and the communities that help us thrive, follow Defying the Red Zone on Substack: https://japansolo.substack.com/p/do-you-know-what-this-is-i-didnt
