What happened to my calculator?!?

Where am I?

I remember when my Father used to say, “when camcorders come down to $500, we will get one”. Sadly he never really saw that day. It would really blow his mind to see that for $300 you can get one that can save data on a *memory card, *a usb device, *a dvd, or even possibly *transmit wirelessly to some other device. [* = all things that a) he never experienced, b) would totally wow him and blow his mind] I mean, he was impressed with the 3 1/4” floppy disk and playing DOOM on the pc. Now you can fit almost 3000 copies of that same game onto a 4 gig micro sd card. I am still impressed with that myself.

If you are of a certain age group, you may view technology in an interesting way. The way I remember it, computers did always exist, but in a primitive form. I was exposed to computers on a personal level about the time of the Apple IIe. My Grandmother [of all people – and who is super cool like that] was the one who taught me how to use them. I was so young; I can vaguely remember the silly games and print shop that we would use. Somehow or another, me and my similarly young family members were able to put in the disks, load the programs, and be entertained for hours. I remember that it was a big deal that we had computers in elementary school that would run spelling games, though we only had one in the class room and we had to take turns… [think ooo ooo ooo me next! Haha]. It was cool though, and we did take turns.

I remember using the Turbo button [one of the ways that I judge the age of an old looking computer] to play very simple games just a bit faster. Now it is lag across the ocean that seems to be the only major slowness of a pc [at least if you have a respectable one]. Well, that and this horrible satellite internet connection that I am currently bound to [beats the buttons off a dial up connection and that retched modem noise that could wake the dead].

These days, when I see a 4 year old child playing games on a mobile phone, I think it is neat that they can do it, but it doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me think of the future and how one day they will be blogging on some device unheard of today, reflecting on how slow that phone was.