Technology

Lillian let me borrow a mystery novel, the first in a series, which was written in the 1980's.

Let me just say, up front, that I don't consider the 1980's to be the distant past. I remember the 80's. I lived them. Therefore they must have happened... well, just yesterday. I am constantly shocked by the paradox of time, such as when children born in the 90's are old enough to drive or go to college or, God Forbid, have children themselves. I tried to watch Back To The Future a few weeks ago, a movie I saw in the theater, twice, and loved. And I realized that we were almost as far from 1985 as Marty was from 1955.

Yes, like sands through the hourglass, yadda yadda yadda.

And at first, I was disappointed. In the Back To The Future films, the future was a vastly different place, with holographs and mechanical wonders and flying machines everywhere. And our future didn't turn out to be half as fantastical, did it?

But if you pick up a mystery novel written in the 80's, certain things start to stand out. And I'm not just talking about the lack of Homeland Security. In this book the detective stumbles upon a crime scene. He then picks up the phone, dials a number, punches in a few more numbers, and hangs up. And twp minutes later, the phone rings, and it's his partner. I had to read that paragraph TWICE before I realized he was punching in a beeper number. Remember beepers? They were really big before cell phones.

Nobody had cell phones in the 80's. Oh, there were car phones - we had a phone in our car. It was huge. It was wired in. You had to know the number. It was pretty confusing and, when you think about how tiny and portable cell phones are, really inconvenient.

And now phones are not just phones. We surf the web with them - you know, the internet. That vast mystical realm of information out there, some of it more reliable than the rest, somehow just floating in the air, waiting to make its way to your computer. And we use the internet for email - something much faster and more convenient than sending letters. And emails can now be sent right to your phone. You can get email while you're waiting on line at the grocery store, or picking up your kid at school.

What's more, you can play games on your phone. Games much better than the blocky Atari ones we used to play, the ones that required a Blocky TV (TV's used to be 3D, meaning they weren't always flat), and a game system the size of a typewriter. And cartridges with the games on them were as big as Video tapes.

You remember video tapes? They used to have those before DVD's. Which we practically don't need anymore because the internet allows us to download movies and TV shows right to our TVs and computers and phones. You can go on vacation and still answer work calls and emails, and then watch a movie and listen to your favorite band's newest song. You can take pictures with your phone and movies with your phone and share them with your friends and family instantly my uploading them to the social networking site of your choice.

I can remember when taking a picture was a gamble because you only had 24 shots on a roll of film, and the best you could hope for was that everyone was looking at the camera and no one was making a funny face and that you didn't cut anyone's head off. Now you can take 47 shots of a sunset. You can take pictures of every pair of shoes in a store and email them to your girlfriend to see what she thinks because she needs a new pair and they are having a sale and you happen to be there while she is at work.

It's scary, isn't it? We don't know what the future is going to be like. Even 25 years from now, we can't predict what will be big and what will fizzle like a sparkler.