Personal:

You really do never know what's going to happen

I saw the first Star Wars movie in 1977, when it first came out, before it had an episode number or a subtitle of "A New Hope". I saw it in in an old movie theater with a noisy film projector in Memphis, Tennessee, as a soon to be 13-year old boy whose imagination had already been caught by reruns of Star Trek.

I was fascinated by the library computer used by Science Officer Spock, and I was impressed that the military organization of Starfleet (as depicted back then) had a dedicated science division.

Star Wars was of a different genre than the science fiction presented by Star Trek, and it didn't capture my heart in the way that the movie did so many others. This is not to say that I didn't enjoy the movie, but it couldn't lure me away from the promise of things to come as shown in Star Trek, which was a future set in our universe, not a story from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

I now hold a ticked to see the last Star Wars movie in 2005, with a strange symmetry in that the new movie is numbered "Episode III" when the first movie I saw 28 years ago was later labeled "Episode IV". I will see it in a state of the art digital theater in Paris, France, as a soon to be 41-year old man whose life has taken paths I never imagined even a decade ago, much less when I was 12.

The computer I am using to compose this is a laptop that is more powerful than the room-sized computer I first learned to program on 23 years ago, and it can access a network that is filled with even more information than the imaginations of the writers of Star Trek dreamed of 38 years ago.

I now do research for a company that makes the integrated circuit chips behind this explosion of computer technology, and my job is to find new materials and design new structures to make the devices even smaller, faster, more powerful, and less energy-hungry. The job has taken me to an expatriate assignment in France, and I'm in Paris this weekend as part of a business trip.

Not bad for a boy whose elementary and high school education was in Mississippi (which even then had the lowest amount of money spent on education by all measures).

Now I wonder what the next 28 years will bring.