Technology Today

Close your eyes, relax, and think back to a time... a time when you yourself were a child. Computers? Few and far between. Cell phones? Who had those?! Cable TV didn't have millions of channels with still nothing on and the closet you could get to reality TV was an episode of Cops! Video games were a new thing and hardly anyone had them. Phone calls weren't cheap and and all correspondence was done by old fashioned mail.

Today I have found myself thinking about just how much has changed since I was a child. In Elementary school I remember how special our school was to have a computer lab! There weren't enough for each of us to use a computer so we had to share. I still remember our teachers telling us over and over "do not stick your finger in the hold of the floppy!" My dad had a laptop computer with a black and white screen because his job had something to do with computers (to this day I still couldn't tell you what he did). I remember watching him one night installing a new version of windows... sticking disk after disk into the computer. There were no cell phones. The internet? Well, I'd heard of it, but we didn't have it. It was expensive to get connected! We had a Nintendo, but not a ton of games for it. I remember talking to my relatives in England only on birthdays or Christmas because it was so expensive to make a call. I remember having a boom box with a cassette player and thinking how cool it was. Sometimes my dad would take me to the record shop with him... yes, the store sold vinyl!

Just how much things have changed!

I realized today Eirik will never know a world where computers are a luxury item. I'm embarrassed to confess here my household currently has 5 computers.. My husband and I each have a desktop and a laptop and my husband has an additional music computer built especially for that purpose. He will never know life without being connected. At the age of 8 months old he already has a pretty impressive digital "footprint". By the time he is a teenager I can't even begin to imagine the sort of technology that will be available to him. In just 10 years look how far cell phones have come! What was once a device used to make calls can now surf the web, post facebook updates, make calls, and even tell you how to get from point A to point B!

When I was a child photographs took a week to develop and were picked up at the grocery store. You could get copies and mail those to your relatives. Now I can instantly take a photograph of Eirik, put it on the computer, and e-mail it to my parents. Video? I still vividly remember the big bulky video camera my friends dad owned. Today my cell phone can record videos and upload them directly to a webpage.

Today however I got to experience one of the best aspects of all of this new technology. This afternoon I sat in my living room and had a video chat with my entire family in England. What was impossible to do when I was a child is now commonplace. I could see the look of happiness and joy on my relatives face as they sat watching Eirik playing with his toys on the floor. No longer do they have to wait to see updated pictures and hear about what he is doing. No, now they can watch. I smiled because even though today he doesn't understand who the people on the screen are, I know as he grows up we can continue to have these video chats. It will give him a relationship with his grandparents and great grandparents that I never had.

I can't begin to imagine what sort of technology will be coming out in 10 years time. Really, its amazing how far we've come.