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The pervasive growth of technology is changing the face of ... well, just about everything, judging by some recent reports in this newspaper. Take a look for yourself:

When now-retired Medford physician John Watson arrived here in 1959, there were no radiating or oncology facilities, no linear accelerate, no MRI or CAT scans, and nurses did the anesthesia.

On staff at what was then Rogue Valley Memorial Hospital, Watson witnessed the arrival of an intensive-care facility for newborns, magnetic resonance imaging, computerized scanners, a family birth center, laser treatments, cryosurgery for early skin cancers, suture machines and much more.

When Watson began his career, malpractice insurance cost $250 a year, compared to $57,000 when he retired a decade ago. Doctors didn't practice defensive medicine and call for the space-age tests so common today.

Kate Davidson used the technology of the Internet to create a new market for a decidedly old-tech product: feathers.

Davidson, of Siskiyou Aviary, began marketing "molted feathers" from her exotic birds, as an improvement over feathers from birds that are killed and their plumage harvested. Davidson's idea protects the resource -- that being the birds, many of which are endangered -- and provides her primary customers, fly-tyers, with feathers that may not be available otherwise.

Davidson does 85 percent of her business on the World Wide Web; her home page tallies 1,500 visits a day from fly-tyers and artists. Her success story shows that technology can offer unfettered communication, vast sources of information and robust business free from the location restraints and other worries of the typical downtown merchant.

Wells Fargo Bank will close the downtown Medford branch of First Interstate Bank July 24. That bank has been a fixture in Medford since it opened as First National Bank of Oregon in 1955.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo purchased the First Interstate network about two years ago; unhappy Oregon customers reportedly pulled out a billion dollars in deposits.

As the Mail Tribune's Paul Macomber noted Sunday, the windowless 21,839-square-foot office at Main and Front -- which has just six resident employees left there -- was constructed before the computer era. Back then, banks had lots of paperwork and plenty of employees to do it by hand.

These days, savvy marketers are taking banks to where the people are, malls and shopping developments, and positioning automatic teller machines for store customers. Coming next: Internet banking, allowing customers to bank from wherever to whenever, 24 hours a day.

THE QUESTION WE'RE left with is: Will computerized industries be able to provide better customer service than did their predecessors, and produce satisfying jobs for employees -- those who don't face the computer ax?