Golly, I still use WordStar for some of my creative-writing pursuits. It's how I learned to interact with a computer, and so it is primal and effortless for me. Also, like some rangefinders, it was just a smacking good invention.
Technology and society have been advancing and evolving fairly swiftly for many hundreds of years, if not thousands. Even the cliche of relatively unchanging Medieval life is off the mark -- the movement of ideas was constant, even if most folks were just getting on with their lives.
Photography is particularly interesting because most of us now practiciing it have been doing so for half a century or less. Your insightful essay mentioned the transition to SLR from the late '50s to early '60s as a starting point because it's in our direct or recent cultural memories. Other seminal advances in photography happened to our parents and grandparents, so we don't feel a personal link to them -- the advent of usable color films in the 1940s, which fed the proliferation of fast lenses of the early 1950s; the development of small 35mm cameras in the 1920s and 1930s, which tranformed the camera from a large box to an unobtrusive personal instrument; the ability to "freeze" motion that became widespread in the 1910s, the "point and shoot" simplicity of the first Kodaks in the late 1800s, which made the word Kodak interchangeable with "camera" and which had as much impact on society as today's digital point and shoot. And before that, dry plates replacing wet plates, wet plates replacing daguerotypes, daguerotypes replacing painted locket portraits ... all the way back to when Fra Filippo Lippi demonstrated that a live model could sit for a religious portrait ... back to the unknown Roman and Greek men and women who posed for the statues of their gods and goddesses ... back to the cave painters.
Those who record images of our fellow human beings have inherited a wondrous, and wondrously evolving, legacy. I can't wait until I've grown old enough to catch glimpses of the world my children will know.
