My new science project ... homemade dials, a few lights, and a maze of wires all soldered together in such a way that when the correct answer was entered, the lights flashed. My first computer!

By Michael Brown
I can’t remember when I wasn’t fascinated by science and technology. As a boy I visited every museum and science exhibit I could find. Scientists were my heroes, and I wanted to be one when I grew up.
I remember one model in the Toronto Museum in particular—a vivid picture etched in the mind of a young teenager. It was a futuristic computer-controlled robot that most teens today would probably find amusingly rudimentary, but forty years ago it was as fantastic as anything I had seen in Buck Rogers comic books or on the original Star Trek TV series. From the perspective of today’s technology, it was rudimentary, the “computer” being a simple analog adding machine and the “robot” a wire-frame figure covered with a burlap potato sack.
When I returned home, I headed straight for the library, where I found a book on how to make an analog computer. For the next month or so I immersed myself in my new science project. It was very basic, consisting of a series of homemade dials, a few lights, and a maze of wires all soldered together in such a way that when the correct answer was entered, the lights flashed. My first computer!
Instead of becoming a scientist when I grew up, however, I became a Christian volunteer. I was living in remote areas of India and Nepal when the computer revolution hit the West in the 1980s, so when I returned to Europe in 1989, I experienced culture shock.
Years earlier, I had first read in the Bible about the Antichrist and the mark of the Beast: “He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the Beast” (Revelation 13:16–17). I had also read “The Computer Chip Dream,” an article by David Brandt Berg (see page 4) about a dream he had in which the mark of the Beast was a computer chip that was implanted under the skin and read by a scanner.
I knew that someday the mark of the Beast would come, but I was in for the shock of my life when I went to a grocery store to buy some bread and cheese and the cashier ran my items past a scanner—the first I’d ever seen. I thought, “Oh, no! It’s already here!”
Funny, but not so funny when you realize how rapidly knowledge is increasing and where that knowledge is taking us. Seventy percent of all information in our global society has been created since the “birth of the Internet” about 20 years ago, and it is currently doubling every three years. Yes, the world is changing, and while the mark of the Beast is not yet in use, there are plenty of indications that it’s on the way.
When I consider how much the world has changed since my rudimentary science project, it’s not a stretch to imagine the technological advances necessary to make the mark of the Beast a reality in the near future. ¨
Michael Brown is a full-time volunteer with the Family International in Croatia.