Memories . . . clear in the moment, but episodic, and then . . . fleeting and fading over time.
And even "At the Time", subject to error and mis-understanding. Think, for example, about multiple conflicting accounts of an accident by "eye-witnesses".
Memories are 'not what they used to be' is a finding we all come to appreciate. And memories can get embellished. My dad said, about his mother: "She can remember things that never even happened."
And Reflections? Gazing back over the past, thinking and pondering even about things from yesteryear, is not all that easy in late life. It takes time, actually sorting and putting things in context, trying to recall just when this or that happened, and how several things interacted. Too often, such efforts are skipped, the person feeling perhaps "Who would care, not even my grandchildren would care." Others who might start, hear phrases such as "Are you trying to re-write history, is this just self-serving?"
All too aware of my own proclivities to recall selectively, I have long jotted down thoughts, impressions, and feelings while on trips or doing things that were hard exercises. Call it Diarying or Journaling, it at least captures the mood of the moment. And given that we just moved (in what my wife Jenny calls a "downsizing"), I found a sizable collection of papers, scribbles on envelopes, or on mostly blank pages torn from an airline magazine when I lacked paper. Almost all have dates, but the piles are extensive, and very unorganized. So, is that a treasure, or something to be gathered and tossed?
Historians often cite some version of the Confucius phrase, "The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory." The fact that this isn't probably one of Confucius' phrases--it likely traces to the Qing dynasty two millennia later--doesn't diminish the point.
Reflections have the advantage of 'hindsight' or more accurately, of placing the event(s) in context. In the moment, you know the specifics, but none of the surrounding story. As a simple example, when we introduced the HP 1300A, the X-Y-Z Display that served as HP's first graphical computer display monitor (an amazing four years before IBM did so; and eleven years before DEC), I knew of some great early examples. I had shown a prototype to Information International Inc, which got excited about using it for movie graphics. Who'd suspect they'd use that to begin work on Tron? The AP Wire Photo news service picture of Dr. Denton Cooley using our HP 1308A for the first artificial heart transplant was great. https://www.texasheart.org/50th-anniversary-of-the-worlds-first-total-artificial-heart/
Al DeVilbiss and I designed the modification of the Z-axis to permit 80 MHz signals to handle space video so that the world could see Neal Armstrong's foot land on the moon July 20, 1969. I'd also shown a prototype to Doug Engelbart for what became the "Mother of all Demos"
But it wasn't until 34 years later that I was interviewing Alan Kay and the topic happened to come up, to which he said, roughly, "the HP 1300A was the ONLY possible display for me to use for the FlexWriter in late 1967 and early1968 at U of Utah." Imagine--he is doing his PhD there under Ivan Sutherland, who with Dave Evans is about to start Eans and Sutherland, which gets "the credit" for the first computer graphics company".
https://www.ksl.com/article/36039333/utah-inventions-the-birth-of-computer-graphics
The irony is that I had visited Sutherland at MIT in 1965, after his inspiring talk at the IBM SHARE Design conference in May, 1965 in New Orleans. There's a whole story here, which cements in my mind that the HP 1300A was indeed pioneering--yes, even the Medal of Defiance notwithstanding.
Anyway, the point isn't to revisit that story here, but just to illustrate that the Paul Harvey "Now you know the rest of the story" often can't be constructed, let alone appreciated, without adequate time to discover "the rest of the story:
So, dear reader, if I get going on all those piles and scraps of notes, who knows what might turn up?
