Technology....Then and Now

So tonight was coffee night with the girls...and we got on this subject of how far we've come technology wise. I don't know about you, but I don't often think about the changes...I just go with the flow and try to keep up with the latest. By keeping up with the latest I mean that I don't want to be the Grandma who's calling her granddaughter or grandson asking them to come over to help me figure out my remote control so I can turn my tv on.

Okay so this is really going to show my age....but while walking down memory lane I am truly amazed at how just within the last 20 years things have changed so much. For instance do you remember the rotary phones?? Holy crow how I hated those...if you messed up half way through dialing a number you were screwed and the noise they made!!! Then I remember the touch tone phones...those were so awesome, remember how twisted and tangled the phone cords would get though...where you'd take a step and the whole flippin' phone would fly towards you like you just snapped a rubber band and it would take out everything off the end table when it did that?? Next came the cordless phones....at first they were huge but now they're the size of some cell phones. You can take them outside and talk while you're gardening or while your relaxing on your lawn furniture, but if you're truly relaxing...why do you have you're phone with you??

With music we've definitely come a long way. I remember having a plastic orange record player...the kind that looked like a suitcase....I can still here ABBA playing...I used to love them! Let's not forget the lovely 8 track players...haha...then of course the cassette players or boomboxes that either had Judas Priest or Billy Squire in it...well at least in mine. Now it's CD's or MP3's....even better you can command your car to play the song or artist that you want! I mean really who would've thought that you could tell your car what to do or play?? It was not even something that I would've even conceived in this weee little brain of mine.

Another form of entertainment that came out when I was a kid was of course Atari....remember pong?? A two player game...I think you could play it alone though, but it was just a simple video game. Now you've got kids playing life like games like Halo on Xbox live, talking and playing with kids or adults from all over the world. I often hear kids come over the speaker from downstairs with varying accents....I remember hearing this for the first time....I thought what in the world...who is that...my son just said, "Oh it's a team that we play from China!" I remember just thinking wow....it was seriously like having those kids in my family room. Now you also have varying handheld video games, often used to keep kids busy on those long drives, I even see kids in the waiting rooms of doctors offices or in the carts at a grocery store. They are today's baby sitters.

Speaking of baby sitters, for me it used to be Barney. My kids were entranced by that purple dinosaur. It was Barney, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Blues Clues....they asked for those tapes to be played over and over again. There's another thing that's changed....vcr's to dvd's to recordable dvd's. I won't even get into how much tv's have changed, let alone the size of satellite dishes!

What about the first Cell phones...you know the one's that all the wealthy people had in their convertible cars....LOL...now to look at them it looks like they had a big ol' brick held up to their ears. Now we have cell phones that can access the internet with a touch of a screen and a quick flick of a finger. Have you noticed that with each device whether phones, music players, or cell phones they all started out enormous in size and are mostly all capable of fitting in one's palm.

After this quick trip down memory lane, it leaves me wondering where will it (technology) be when I do have grandchildren. If technology can advance that quickly in 20 years...who's to say that we won't be flying like the Jetson's or that we won't have Holodecks found on Star Trek?? When someone calls us will we see a miniature hologram of the caller like on Star Wars?

Another question is.....what has all of this technology created? Are we moving to fast? With all of this technology that's made to keep us connected...is it really disconnecting us in some way? Can someone really go on a relaxing vacation without their cell phone, pda, or laptop? Do people really miss the days of old? Now with the home phone ringing, cell phones buzzing and the glare of my computer....I can say there are times that I do miss those days.