After 9/11 and before Christmas that year my father had a heart attack. He was in an unbelievable amount of pain and incredibly uncomfortable for weeks and weeks after. As with most families in Pennsylvania after 9/11, we were stuck to the television. But the full throttle of cable news wasn’t nearly a good distraction from my father’s physical discomfort nor did it occupy his three school-aged children. At the time Comedy Central had a vast collection of game shows, Win Ben Stein’s Money, Beat the Geeks, and reruns of Make me Laugh.

One commercial that recurred during this time was a man wearing glasses, appearing to speak to himself on a park bench. He was surrounded by a flock of pigeons, who were quickly frightened away from him when he began to demand in anger that a broker buy futures in this or that. As it zoomed closer you saw an ear piece with a small lens hovering over your eye and a mouth piece. He stands up and answers a call. The announcer says this is the first wearable computer, coming from IBM. They were advertising the Wireless E Business, a product that not many people had heard of, or remember and even fewer people bought. My older sister remarked that I would likely do the same when I got older without the buying power or phone call.

We sat in the den with our father for weeks, watching television, having instructions for meal prep barked at us, getting jello to sit (one of the approved desserts post heart attack). Each quiz show my dad watched it proved to be an engaging distraction from the pain he was in from the heart attack and discomfort of the missing calories. I can’t tell you how many times that commercial played in our den, but the resolution of the television had me convinced that it was a full pair of glasses.

Around 5pm in those days, it would be my turn to select the program, I chose Dragonball Z, which on Toonami at the time was starting from the beginning. The evil Sayians were attempting to infiltrate the Earth to seize the Dragonballs to be granted a wish for immortality. On their ear was a device called a scouter, a small reader with an ear and eye piece that would act as a communicator and a detector of energy levels of potential threats. Now as the series as petered out the only thing made seemingly immortal was that franchise’s ability to hint and forthcoming content that would inevitably confuse and disappoint its eager fan base.

I would like to believe that the scouters in DBZ and the Wireless E Business played large in my imagination. They really didn’t. I just as a child assumed that’s what one day computing and communication should become versus landlines and desktop computers that needed so much desk space. Cell phones were of course available at this time, but very people in my small town had one or saw the need for it.