Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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Maybe it was the fact that spring was fully sprung, and the forsythia and crabapple were at their heighth. Or possibly it was paternal pride. Or I might have been hiding out my office for too long, the only music my CD player turned way low.

But I forgot how wonderful a live piano sounds. At the recital I watched as players young and old took their place at the bench. One moment, Bach and Brahms were abstract entries in encyclopedias. The next thing you knew, they were alive in the little room, and you could hear their thoughts and feel their passion.

It made me think, too, how long a technology takes to become part of the family.

When the pianoforte was first invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori, somewhere around 1710, it was reviled by many ("Evolution of the Piano"). Musicians, unionized even then, saw automation staring them in the face. Where a trumpeter played one note at a time, a piano played ten - more, if you used your elbows.

With a clever arrangement, a piano could replace a small orchestra. People of means could have a piano at home and enjoy complex musical performances any time they liked - cocooning, 1700s-style.

Second, it was such a machine. The heavy iron frame inside it could only be created by an industrial society. It was a robotic monster of ranks, hammers, and levers. In time, the mechanical mind that created the piano would found a way to make it play itself.

In other words, the traditionalists of the time mistrusted the new instrument much as we mistrust the PC today.

The main differences between the two - other than the fact that the only things digital about a piano are the pianist's fingers - are repertoire and time.

In time we overcame our pianophobia. The instrument is as cherished a part of our culture today as a bicycle or a clock. Computers, on the other hand --

It is our fate to live in a time of simultaneous wonder and aggravation. On the one hand, computers are so seductive and their potential is so tremendous. On the other hand is everyday reality of tech support and upgrades and having to type all the "http://" lines atop our browsers all wear down our patience and our trust.

We are cynical because we expect the big players like Microsoft and Oracle and Intel to supply the repertoire. They'd be more than happy to.

Future generations will think of us as the pioneers, whose wagon ruts and abandoned, bleached bones showed the way to all who followed. We may never see the promised land, but we see our posterity drawing nearer to it.

But think what it will be like in years to come, when information technology finally matures, and systems are genuinely intuitive to operate, and the creative people who have hated computers finally warm to them, and they acquire, against all probability, a soul.

I'm not talking about computerized pianos or killer applications or gee-whiz 4D graphics. I probably am talking about a day when artificial intelligence and interface design combine to make the computer an easy and natural way for people to do whatever they want to do. Like on the TV show Jon's mother sometimes has to pull him away from to practice piano -- Star Trek. You talk, it understands and obeys.

When that day comes, our sons and daughters will have supplied the new repertoire.

But Cristofori, who invented an instrument for which there was no repertoire, understood that traditions take time - centuries and lifetimes to evolve.

And we're getting there. After the rain subsided, my son and I took a walk through the damp streets. We saw a stack of soaked Gateway boxes in the alley behind the house of the man who runs the Insty-Lube. Further on, in an upstairs window, we recognized the blue light of a monitor reflected in a woman's face.

People are answering e-mail from friends far away. They are writing poems and saving them to bits, that can be called up again like the notes on a score and the original feeling will be there again.

Bits from other summers blossom again as fresh passion. The word that comes to mind is fortississimo, the musical annotation for "strongest possible."

The rumble of the treble key, that quickly fades to quiet, and the fleeting fragrance of the lilacs, tell me we have all the time in the world.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.