The March of Technology

It hit me today that the march of technology has come so far from the days of my parents' youth when Sputnik was the big thing. Yes they were like three years old, so they did not remember it, but at the same time, it was the height of technology, a little metal ball that sent out a steady beep. Computers were the size of rooms. Telephones required lines. Television was in black and white.

Yet, as I drove home today I realized that while Sputnik was so huge a deal back then, in a mere half a century or so, I was being guided home by what amounted to a talking map that was guided by a series of satellites in orbit. From the height of military science and competition to an everyday guidance system, how we view satellite technology has changed.

Dick Tracy in my grandmother's time would speak to people on a screen and it was considered to be more outlandish than flying cars. Well I'm not flying everywhere yet, but webcams and some phones like the iPhone4 allow for people to see one another as they speak to each other. I can see a person as I speak to them thousands of miles away, and we can communicate in real time!

Computers were the size of rooms. Now? Now I have a fifteen inch laptop that I'm typing this on. Cellular phones have infinitely more processing power than those old computers that took up entire rooms, and are hardly the big secrets that those old computers were. For goodness sake, in World War Two encryption was enough, and by 1991 the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had a mobile phone with nine hundred levels of encryption.

And phones, phones used to have lines and rotary dials. Now landline phones are swiftly moving to extinction, even if I have one at the moment. Mobile phones now have cameras, games, fit in pockets, and have touch screens.

It is astounding really, how far technology has marched. I must ask myself, when I am my parents' age, how far will it have come from what I use now? The internet would have been undreamed of by the general population almost forty years ago; in forty years, what will exist for my generation that we never would have dreamed?