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As I sit here, I am remembering a time when I was a kid, watching Star Trek and laughing about how ridiculous the gadgets in it were at the time. Tricorders, communicator badges, etc.
Now, here I am, writing this on a laptop computer that has more computing power than any computer in the entire U.S. Military at the time of those episodes, an 80GB hard drive (which is even small by today’s standards), wireless capabilities with a theoretical maximum speed of 300 Mbits/s, and a fingerprint scanner.
I am connected to a computer network that communicates in the gigabit\s speeds, has hundreds of other computers, and maintains storage capacity of nearly 7 terabytes, and our network is small!
I cooked my lunch in a microwave oven, in 3 minutes, that would have taken my mother 30 minutes in a standard oven to cook when I was a kid.
I carry around a PDA and a Blackberry, both of which have about 5x the computing power of the first home computer I ever owned and they both fit in the palm of my hand. I also carry a personal cellular phone that has portable television capabilities.
In our car we have a GPS unit that can direct me, turn by turn, straight to someone’s front doorstep on the other side of the country that I have never personally been to before.
I work for a cirtcuit board manufacturing company that has machines that regularly place capacitors and resistors that are as small as .0001 inch x .0005 inch size, basically a grain of salt, and it places them at high speeds in the thousands per board.
We print barcoded labels that are .750 inch x .250 inch at 600 dpi that holds a 2-dimensional barcode that can contain nearly 100 characters.
When I leave here today I will be using my laptop, via a connection with my Blackberry, to surf the internet from the seat of a bus. The bus will be travelling an average of 45-50 mph and going through a city of over 1,000,000 other people.
You, the reader, are most likely someone I’ve never personally met and chances are you live at least across the country, if not the world.
You came across this mindless pondering of mine by also surfing the internet. You are among as many as 1,668,870,408 people worldwide who regularly surf the internet.
Take a moment to remember how your life was as a kid and compare it to your life now.
As I write this I can’t help but have a couple questions.
1. What changes and advancements will our children get to see if we have seen so much within our lives?
2. Where the hell is my Transporter and my hand-held Phaser?!