I’m the only son of my parents, which were themselves their parents’ only children, so I have very few relatives back in time. Furthermore, my dad left us before I had a chance to get to know him, so I grew up with my mom. She was a hard working, but somewhat lonely woman who cared for me deeply. I guess I was her sunshine while growing up, although I probably gave her a few gray hairs as well.
Despite having no siblings, no cousins and no dad, I wasn’t alone. We lived in an apartment building also housing some other, older relatives. My maternal grandma and grandpa lived there, as well as my great-grandparents and a few other, more distant relatives. At that time, many women still spent much of their time at home cooking, doing laundry, drinking coffee and taking care of their homes (and me). So there was always someone around. My grandfather had a boat and we spent time fishing or picking berries on the islands. I grew up in a small city named Karlskrona, located in the south of Sweden, blessed with a marvelous archipelago. There were still plenty of fish in the Baltic Sea at the time, which is – sadly – not the case any more due to over-fishing, fertilizer runoff, oxygen depletion and global warming.
Technical Stuff
For some reason, I developed a keen interest in all things technical early on. I remember spending much of my weekly allowance on batteries, switches, low voltage lamps and doorbells. Anything I could get my hands on. We also scrounged for stuff in old, abandoned cars and buildings. There were plenty of those around to explore. I doubt my mom and grandparents would have approved of my whereabouts, but I generally managed to keep this off their radar.
I got to know a few other kids with similar interests. I remember being very jealous when one of my friends got an electronics kit for his birthday with which he could build a working transistor radio! We didn’t have much money, so I had to mostly make do with stuff I could find. I managed to “occupy” a small room in the basement of our apartment building. There we stocked up on broken TV-sets, radios and other stuff. We spent quite some time taking those apart, carefully desoldering the components, sorting them into paper boxes. Tubes, resistors, capacitors and the odd transistor. We used some of those tubes to fix up TV-sets for neighbors, learning and making some money in the process.
Apart from the naval shipyard – the main employer in the city (my mom, grandfather and great-grandfather all worked there) – there was also an Ericsson factory employing a significant number of people. As you may recall, Ericsson was one of the telecom giants, along with Nokia in Finland, before the smartphone made its entrance. The factory they had in my home town made phones as well as those electro-mechanical phone-system switches that filled entire rooms. They had a scrapyard near the factory, down in the harbor, well within biking distance. It was easy to crawl under the gate after hours, so we found plenty of wire and other interesting tidbits there.
Music
I became interested in music – both playing and listening – when I was around 10. My mother had a piano which she rarely used. I think she hoped that I would pick it up. I did try, and even took some lessons, but hated it. I even recall at one point deliberately “losing” the coin I was supposed to pay the bus with going to a lesson. So piano wasn’t my thing. As a result, I never learned to read sheet music properly.
But my grandmother had an old guitar that I got hold of it, put on new strings, and started practicing. This was easier and more fun to get started with. My grandfather was pretty good at mandolin and violin. Once I had learned some basic chords on my own, he suggested we’d practice together. So we spent countless afternoons playing his kind of music. While it gave me the practice I needed, the kind of music he liked – mostly German march music – wasn’t quite my thing.
I was given a few record albums, but those didn’t really resonate with me. My first real, music “aha” moment came when I borrowed a record from a new classmate, who had just moved down from Stockholm. This was Janne Schaffer’s first album. He was a very talented guitarist who later became known as one of the musicians behind the Swedish band ABBA, but he also played with the Porcaro guys (later known as TOTO) and numerous other artists. I’ve discarded of most of the vinyl records I bought over the years (after digitizing the ones I really liked), but have eagerly held on to all my Janne Schaffer albums.
My grandmother’s old guitar soon gave way to an electric one that I borrowed from a friend. Likewise, the german marches I played with my grandfather gave way to jazz, rock and other more contemporary flavors (some of which you can hear in the Music article).
The fact that this was an electric guitar fit hand-in-glove with my interest in electronics, resulting in numerous, home-made contraptions over the years ranging from small fuzz-boxes to large “Marshall style” speaker stacks.
Faith
Like most kids, I didn’t think much about faith or philosophy in general when I was little. My mother sang in the choir in the big church in our city, but was otherwise not very religious. I later learned that she had a really bad experience with some people in another church at a young age, which I believe caused her to lose much of her faith – although not all of it. My grandparents went to church regularly, though, and had more of a genuine faith. I also recall my grandfather reading with me from a large bible, sprinkled with full-page illustrations by Gustave Doré. I believe this had a somewhat subconscious impact on me, as the memory stuck with me.
Around the same time as my music interest began, I also began to think about more philosophical questions, including where things come from, why we’re here, and such. I started to read more on my own and occasionally joined my grandfather to church. What I learned generally resonated with something deep down within me. I gradually developed a Christian faith that has remained with me to this very day, for which I’m very grateful.
As a side note, the church I came to join had a lot of activities around music. There were lots of choirs, orchestras, groups and bands – engaging people of all ages with various kinds of music. It was a very welcoming and nurturing environment for a budding, young musician. Playing “for real” with others made me grow and hone my skills. Indeed, many well known Swedish musicians over the past 50 years have their roots in various churches for this very reason.
Linköping
After finishing two years at high school, I decided to opt for a third year focusing on industrial automation. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), this wasn’t available in my home town. Hence, I decided to move together with another classmate to the city of Linköping. Having never even visited that town, this was quite an exciting adventure for two 17 year old boys. So we loaded up a trailer with our stuff and a friend of my mother drove us the four hours up north. He dropped us off outside a small apartment we managed to rent, within walking distance of our new school.
The main focus for this year’s education was industrial automation – think automated processing plants and robotics. As part of this education we were soon equipped with a computer training kit. While traditional computers up to this point had been large and clumsy devices, a new and revolutionary piece of technology had just been introduced – the microprocessor. This promised to bring computing into many more areas of life, including industrial automation, so it made sense. However, since this stuff was brand new, none of my teachers new anything about it. So I was pretty much left alone in exploring this new thingy.
The Microcomputer
This microcomputer kit was very rudimentary, and not at all what the word computer conjures up today. It was blue, the size of a small shoebox, housing an 8-bit Motorola 6800 processor and a grand total of 256 bytes (!) of memory. Unfortunately, all I have left is this crappy image of the computer and the books that came with it.
The computer didn’t really have any software to speak of. It supported no programming language (not even assembler), and had to be programmed in machine code. Despite this sad state of affairs, I was hooked. My focus swiftly turned away from industrial automation toward this shiny, new thing. Tinkering with it, trying to make it do things, reminded me a lot of the LEGO kit I had as a child. Except here you never ran out of pieces – although you could quite easily run out of memory.
My First Job
It turned out that Didact, the company making that blue computer, was located in town. Noticing my keen interest in this direction, my teacher managed to get me in there even before finishing the last semester. He probably figured I wasn’t going to learn a whole lot more about industrial automation anyway.
I stayed at that company a little over a year, assembling those blue computers as well as doing some hardware and minor software development projects. I even went to Sweden’s very first computer trade show, manning our booth there. But my interest was clearly in the direction of software, so at some point it became clear that I had to look elsewhere to get anywhere, since my main job at Didact was still manufacturing.
The Love of my Life and Family
Around that time, I met Anneth during a church outing. We chatted briefly on the bus back home, and started to hang out shortly thereafter. I guess this was a typical “opposites attracts” case. I was outgoing, playing in a couple of bands and interested in technical stuff. She – a Linköping native – was soo sweet but rather shy, mostly kept to herself and was not at all into anything technical. A few years later we got married and have remained together ever since. Being “opposites” has had is challenges, but our respective strengths and weaknesses have also been very complementary, helping us support each other throughout.
Our relationship also gave us our three beautiful children and by now six grandchildren. A true blessing that have filled our lives with so much meaning (and work!).
My Second Job
My initial plan was to spend a year at school in Linköping and then move back home. Meeting Anneth changed all that. The other change that came to solidify that decision was my second job. As I started looking for a new job, I interviewed with some tech companies in town. One of those was Saab (yes, the same Saab that made cars and airplanes). They also made computers at the time. But I wasn’t too keen on becoming a small cog in a large organization. I was looking for a place where I could make a difference.
My two passions in life (apart from my girlfriend) were computers and music. Looking through the local phonebook for computer companies I could apply to, I found one that sounded very interesting indeed; Dataton. The word “data” is Swedish for Computer and “ton” represents music. I had also seen an ad from this company a while back for a rather interesting audio processing device, but didn’t know they were local to my new home town. So I just had to give them a call.
It turned out it wasn’t really a “them,” but just one guy named Björn. His founding partner had recently left the company and moved to Stockholm. So Björn needed some company, and decided to hire me. At that time, the main product was still a musical synthesizer system, although a slide projector control box had recently been added to the mix to enhance the sound generation with visuals.
The company, now consisting of Björn and myself, moved from our downtown office to the basement of his new house, a few kilometers south of Linköping city. The little slide projector control box grew into the main product of the company, and I became the software architect and main developer. New control boxes and computer programs were added over the years, and all this carried us through the 80s. For more on what I did at Dataton, see the chapter with that name in my first Timeline article.
PIXILAB
After spending about 35 years at Dataton, it was definitely time to move on. Yes, I know, that’s a long time. Sometimes I’ve wondered how things would have evolved had I made the jump earlier. For instance, what would have happened had I left 15 years prior, when I came up with WATCHOUT? It was a pretty close call since WATCHOUT was purely a software-based product at its outset, and Dataton really was a hardware company. We’ll never know, since that was a potential, parallell timeline that wasn’t pursued.
Anyway, the summer of 2015, I made the decision to move on. Better late than never, as they say. The new opportunity I saw revolved around modern web technology. My ideas here would probably not have been able to blossom without being seeded into a new company. Within a year, I was accompanied by two other ex-colleagues plus now some other people along the way.
Looking back, now almost 10 years later, this turned out to be a good decision. We’ve been able to grow our business and have even remained profitable throughout. We’re still a small company, but we’re definitely heading in the right direction. More on this in my articles on PIXILAB and Blocks.
Epilogue – The Exponential Century
Over my lifetime, I’ve noticed how things keep popping up at an increasing pace. At first, when I was a kid, I din’t really notice, and the world appeared static. But with time, those rapid changes became very apparent.
When I was about 12 years old, I was given a mechanical gramophone by an elderly neighbor. This was the wind-up kind, with a crank on the side. It did work and could play our records. However, the radio-gramophone we had in our living room could play them at much higher volume due to the glowing glass tubes it had inside. While accomplishing the same basic purpose (playing records), these devices were clearly different, representing the transition from the purely mechanical to the electro-mechanical age.
The transistor was commercialized around when I was born, replacing those “glowing glass tubes”. The integrated circuit soon followed – accomplished by placing multiple transistors on a single chip. The first microprocessors appearing in the early 70s. The pace of development accelerated even more throughout the 70s with competing companies such as Fairchild, Intel, Texas Instruments, Motorola and others.
As a side note, while I focus on electronics here, since that’s what I know, many other interesting events happened concurrently, largely feeding off of each other. Some were driven by the Cold War, such as the space race culminating with the Apollo 11 mission putting people on the moon – something I watched eagerly on our black-and-white TV set. Watson & Crick discovered the structure of our DNA. There were hippies and rock & roll…
Small, but usable, computers were soon built around those microprocessors by Altair, Commodore, Apple and many others (including Didact, mentioned above). All this happened to coincide with my move to Linköping for my last year in school, where I had the fortune to come across those newfangled contraptions. We were clearly transitioning from the electro-mechanical to the purely electronic age, with more and more functionality moving from hardware to software.
Why Now?
As I noticed all this rapid change around me, exemplified above by transitioning from the purely mechanical to the purely electronic age within a few decades, I had to ask how? and why now? Were we just that much smarter than previous generations? Although one might like to think so, that’s clearly not the case. People in the past had to know much more about a wide variety of subjects, and make far harder decisions, just to stay alive. So, again, where did this accelerating change come from?
The world of today has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, generally considered to have begun in England a few hundred years ago. While we often tend to think of this in terms of innovations, such as the loom and the steam engine, there’s an even more important underpinning that’s often overlooked; energy. During the early phase of the industrial revolution, this came in the form of coal. Not only did steam engines run on coal, but they were invented primarily for use in coal mines. The steam engine evolved into locomotives, trains and ships.
All this additional energy turbocharged growth and specialization. People no longer had to spend most of their time producing calories to feed themselves and their animals. Instead, they could specialize into a myriad of occupations. They concentrated into cities, with machines now doing much of the hard work instead of people and animals.
Once all this was transplanted into the New World, an even more potent fuel was found; oil. Oil has higher energy density than coal and is easy to handle, making it the perfect fuel for the new automobile. It could also be distilled to create many other fuels and materials, including kerosene for lighting, jet and rocket fuel (for fighting wars and going to the moon), diesel (trucks and tractors), lubrication, asphalt, tires, plastics and numerous other products. Finally, as a by-product, you also get “natural gas,” perfect for heating and many industrial processes including the manufacturing of synthetic fertilizers, fitting nicely with the other major, closely related, revolution now underway.
While technical innovations such as steam engines, electronics, computers, automobiles, rockets and atomic bombs garnered most attention, the industrialization of agriculture was actually even more important for humanity as a whole. It is what (so far) largely has saved us from the prophesies of Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, allowing our population to grow from about 3 billion when I was born to now 8 billion and counting.
Our Current Predicament
As population grew exponentially, so did the affluence of many nations. It began in Europe and the United States with other areas following, now culminating with huge countries such as China and India. The multiplicative and cumulative effects of this growth have resulted in the “hockey stick” curves we now find all around us. Most of this has happened within my lifetime. Note that exponential growth in itself is not necessarily bad – it’s just a mathematical concept. However, when the resulting magnitude begins to approach physical limits in terms or resources, pollution or habitat loss, it becomes a problem.
While much of our attention during the 20th century focused on innovation and economic growth, it was easy to forget that all this was based on our extraction of materials (iron, copper, silicon, phosphorus, etc) and energy (mainly coal, oil and natural gas). Prior to the industrial revolution, most human activities were circular. We gathered and farmed for food, took care of our animals, built buildings of wood, etc. Once used up, those resources decomposed and returned to where they came from. A process largely identical to nature itself.
However, the industrial methods underpinning our current way of life are linear, not circular. We extract raw materials and energy (mostly fossil fuels) in one end, make things, use those things for some time, and dispose the leftovers in landfills, waterways, oceans or into the air. The result is that we’re increasingly running out of easily accessible raw materials and energy to extract, while at the same time suffering from pollution and climate change caused by our careless manufacturing and disposal methods.
So we now find ourselves at this precarious moment where our current way of life has allowed us to expand way beyond the natural “carrying capacity” of our planet, expelling most other living things in the process. We’ve done this by using up much of the accessible raw materials and energy resources stored in our planet’s crust. We’re dumping the residue where it doesn’t belong, thus wreaking havoc with our planet’s ecology and climate.
Most of this (in terms of volume) has happened in my lifetime. We’ve used “ancient sunlight” in the form of fossil fuels in combination with innovation and specialization to grow our population to what many believe is an unsustainable level if it weren’t for our industrial agriculture. But our industrialized way of life is, in itself, clearly not long-term sustainable in its present form. And then I haven’t even began to consider wars, crimes and infighting currently consuming huge amounts of resources – not to mention all the suffering resulting from such activities.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, there’s more for my generation to be ashamed of. Not only have we taken what’s been stored in the earth from the distant past (kindly left there by our ancestors). Now we’re also gobbling up resources from the future, from our children! As we’re gradually running out of the resources used to power our “growth engine” for the past 200 odd years, we’re looking for new ways to keep our economies humming along. In our pursuit for more growth (or just to maintain status quo), we’re increasingly relying on debt. That is; borrowing from the future. Some would go as far as to say stealing, as we’re unlikely to repay those loans within my lifetime.
For several generations now, we’ve gotten used to the future always being better than the past. We vote for politicians promising to make things “great again”, as if it’s possible to play a rerun of history. This is an achilles heel of democracy. But we see the same tendencies also under totalitarian regimes, such as in China, as people are people and revolutions can happen if people get too unhappy.
To summarize, my generation has committed multiple, huge acts of greed. However, given the circumstances and the shortsightedness of our species, I can’t really see how this could have been avoided. But here we are, nevertheless. What the remainder of my timeline may hold, I don’t know. But it is quite clear that the positive feelings and trends from the previous century now have given way to a new awareness that there are dark clouds at the horizon.
Finally, to end this timeline on a personal note, I will do what little I can to not take more than my fair share of the pie. I’ll probably fail, but I must at least try. I also find some solace in my faith, giving me hope both for this creation and for eternity (whatever that is) in ways that lie beyond what we can see and understand here and now.
Mike