For the Holidailies folk coming here: my main domain, http://www.dianarowland.com , seems to be down, so I'm directing today's entry to this site which is a mirror of my domain weblog. Don't get confused. :-)

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I am with phone again, and since I am something of a geek, I decided to upgrade to a PDA phone while I had the chance. And, since Verizon is offering all sorts of deals on the Motorola Q, I went for it.

This phone totally Rocks. It does all the regular phone stuff, but also does all the PDA stuff, with email and web access and all sorts of other nifty cool stuff.

But it wasn't until I was driving back to the office after leaving the Verizon store that it really started to hit me just how incredibly amazing this phone is. Okay, not necessarily this specific phone, but just the whole technology that's wrapped up in this slim little package. Ten years ago, the web was in its infancy (or at least its early toddlerhood.) I had a very rudimentary website, with my first online journal (no one called them blogs back then), and in the US there were more people who did not have email than who did. In just ten years I've gone from a computer with a 486 processor (that I paid a fortune for!) that accessed the internet via a 56k modem to a piece of technology that can kick that 486's ass and can also fit into my back pocket. And everyone has email.

Am I the only one who occasionally just feels blown away by how fast everything is evolving? Heck, not just the computer end of it, but the phone end too. In '96 the phones were big and clunky and airtime was heinously expensive. Today, I don't even have a landline at my house. We never used it, and it was expensive.

Okay, let's go back twenty years. I was mid-high school then, and our family was "first on the block" to have a computer. We had a Commodore Vic 20, and we even paid extra for a big plastic card that stuck onto a slot in the back that gave us 5 extra K of memory! It didn't even had a disk drive. It had a cassette tape drive, and I used to get a huge kick out of playing the saved data on a regular tape player and listening to the wierd screechy noises. We later upgraded to a Commodore 64, and then later an Amiga that ran a CPM operating system. By that time I was starting to take a couple of college classes while I was still in high school, and when I took my first programming class--Fortran--my class was the very first class to NOT have to use the punch cards to enter our programs into the computer.

So, in a span of only half of my life, we've gone from nothing, to a computer in my pocket. With the speed of information exchange now, I just don't think it's possible to predict where technology is going to be even just ten years from now. I can't even begin to conjecture what it's going to be like when my daughter's my age. I wonder if the communication device will even be a physical item at all.