Juris Graney
Staff writer
If time waits for no man, technology almost certainly is the impatient child in the back seat of the family sedan demanding ‘are we there yet?’
The rate of technological innovation has hurtled us forward at a frightening rate, so much so that a term like ‘future shock’ is no longer confined to science fiction but is reality.
In 1984 futurist Alvin Toffler, who coined the term ‘future shock’, wrote that ‘the great growling engine of change’ was technology.
Now that ever-hungry beast has devoured yet another technology, relegating it to the scrap heap.
Like semaphore lines being replaced by electrical telegraph, telephones usurping Morse code, and smart phones replacing them all, technology begets technology, its offspring voiding the usefulness of its predecessor.
As of 2pm last Tuesday, the Long Range Navigation system (LORAN-C) network in St. Anthony succumbed to a fate it had avoided for more than 35 years — extinction.
In a private decommissioning ceremony Canadian Coast Guard officials, dignitaries and six employees bid farewell to the system across Canada that was rendered obsolete by Global Positioning System (GPS) and Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS).
“It was something that had to come,” chain operations control officer Tim Kelly told the Pen last week.
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