I ordered a Sanyo Xacti HD1 hi-def video camcorder a few days ago, and after telling myself that I couldn’t afford the distraction of playing with a new toy during the work-week, I finally opened the box yesterday and put all the pieces together. It’s an amazing piece of technology, small enough to fit in your pocket, with a 10-megapixel lens and the ability to shoot both video and still photographs. Most amazing (to me, at least) is the fact that there are no moving parts: say goodbye to the recordable tape cassette, because it’s been replaced by a 4-gigabyte flash-disk that records a full hour of high-definition video.

After putting the pieces together, charging the battery, and reading the slightly inscrutable manual, I was ready to try it out. But to my consternation, the camcorder would only record one second of video before stopping; no amount of cursing and yelling, pushing of buttons, or reading the manual from cover to cover seemed to work. Finally, a dim light went off in my brain: I hadn’t bothered formatting the memory card. Of course, the manual never said anything about that, but I had tried every other parameter/configuration setting, and that was the only one left. Lo and behold: that was all it took. So I walked around the apartment and recorded several test clips, played them back on the display screen, and congratulated myself on getting it all working …

Except for one minor thing: I wanted to upload the video clips to my desktop computer, which I assumed would be a trivial matter. Indeed, there was a cable in the camera box, with a USB connector on one end, and a small connector on the other end that fit neatly into the camera. When I plugged it into the camera, it beeped in response, so I started up iPhoto (Apple’s sophisticated all-round photo management program), and waited for something to happen. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Undeterred, I looked at the settings available to me on the Sanyo camera; I was instructed to choose one of three forms of connection: “card reader,” “printer,” and “PC computer.” I looked at “card reader,” and thought, “Huh! That’s bizarre…”; looked at “printer,” and thought, “Nope, I don’t want to make a hard-copy print…”; and ultimately made what I thought was the obvious choice: “PC computer.” Nothing happened. I restarted iPhoto, turned the camera off and then back on again, unplugged the cable and plugged it in again, and then cursed loudly at all of the electronic gear that sat silently before me. Still nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Aha, thought I: maybe there’s some software I’m supposed to install — some kind of driver program that knows how to talk to the camcorder. Sure enough, there were two CD’s in the box — one for Windows, and one for Mac. So I stuck the Mac CD into the computer, opened it up, and found that it contained a photo-display program (i.e., something roughly akin to iPhoto), and a folder full of user manuals in a dozen different languages. But no driver software, no installation programs of any kind.

Hmmm … what to do? Well, I opened the English-language PDF user manual, discovered that it was somewhat different than the hard-copy manual in the box, and skimmed through it quickly. Sure enough, there was a page of instructions on how to connect the camera to a computer — which required choosing the “card reader” configuration setting on the camera.

Well, I was certainly willing to follow such instructions, and indeed it worked right away … but I couldn’t help being puzzled. And the reason was something that will bring a smile to anyone who started working in the computer field in the 1970s, or before: a “card reader,” in my early computing career, was a large, noisy, mechanical device that was capable of reading punched cards into a mainframe computer. Even though I had personally installed the 4-gigabyte flashdisk into the camera, and even though I knew it was called a “memory card” in the Sanyo manual, it never occurred to me that the camera would be referred to as a “card reader” — i.e., a device which, when connected via USB cable to my desktop computer, would allow the contents of that “card” to be “read.”

Someone whose exposure to IT and computing only dates back to the beginning of this decade would probably be dumfounded by my mistake; after all, when is the last time any of us actually saw a card reader, or IBM 029 keypunch machines used by “keypunch operators” (a profession that disappeared long ago) to create the punched cards? Such an attitude is understandable: when I searched for pictures of “card readers” on the “images” section of Google, I found 288 separate pictures of USB-style devices that can read flash-disks, and no examples of the old-fashioned devices from my youth.

On the other hand, the old technology has not disappeared completely. Who can forget the saga of the “hanging chads” in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election? The pictures we all saw in the newspapers involved a man with a very large eye gazing at the holes in a punched card; but had there been no claim of hanging chads, those cards would have been read by an old-fashioned card reader.

And I’m reminded of the curious episode that took place a few years ago on the street outside my New York City apartment: I was returning from a walk in the park, and saw that a moving truck was parked in front of my building. As I approached the front door, two burly moving men marched out onto the street with an IBM 029 keypunch machine. Having last seen such a device some 25 years earlier, the last place I would have expected to see one now was in a residential apartment building. And as I walked into the foyer of the building, two more men marched out with another ‘029 machine — and then another, and another.

When the owner of the ground-floor apartment emerged onto the street a few moments later, I couldn’t help asking him what was going on. As is so often true in New York City, I had merely nodded politely to the man for the 12 years I had been living in the building, and had no idea what he did for a living — and would never have guessed that he had an apartment full of keypunch machines.

He explained to me that he had been running a service bureau from his apartment for years and years, but that the time had finally come to move. “That’s really a shame,” I said sympathetically. “I have a lot of fond memories of the days of punched cards and keypunch machines, and you must be really sad to finally have to say goodbye to these machines.”

“Oh, no,” he responded, shocked by the suggestion. “I’m not giving them up — my business is expanding and I need more room, for more keypunch machines!” And off he went … presumably to some other part of New York City, where he may well still have an empire of keypunch/punched-card business going on.

Anyway, all of this is simply a reminder to today’s younger technology wizards, as well as a reminder to myself: context is important. My understanding of a seemingly innocent, obvious term may not be the same as yours. We may have radically different understandings, assumptions, and expectations when dealing with a modern technological device like a video camcorder, because we all have different histories, backgrounds, experiences, educations, and cultural background. Face-to-face communication can overcome some of those problems, as can discussion forums, help desks, and hot-line support phones. User manuals, no matter how well-intentioned, often fail in this important regard.