Coming to you LIVE

...from my garage.

I was thinking today about the ubiquity of the Internet and really of PC's in general. I guess in some really dweeby way I've been a bit of an outlier here as I have been using computers since junior high and have had email from the age of 14. That sounds run of the mill now but at the time it made me one of a very small group (there were maybe 5 of us playing with the TRS-80s).

In college I had email but I only recall using it for the class that taught you how to use the email. Maybe one or two people on my hall had computers. I had this high tech pen plotting typewriter thing (it's in my basement now, in it's box, probably never to be used again). I went all the way through undergrad without buying a computer. Now my students can't get to lunch without one.

Don't get me started on cell phones.

After grad school at my first job I did have a computer on my desk, but it wasn't something that could be assumed. The company had an AOL address for Internet access and it was only reachable from one machine. After a stint where my job didn't even have a desk let alone a computer my next gig did come with the assumption that everyone would have a machine (although there it was a week before I got a phone - you think being a project manager without email is hard...). But even that company didn't have ubiquitous email, just the one that went to a marketing person. By this time AOL had gone unlimited so I would use my own account from work for research and client communication. I never felt guilty about tying up a phone line for Internet. I probably should have.

Now, now I am sitting on a patio chair in my garage typing an entry for my blog on a tablet through our wireless. Really that's "last generation." Were I still an outlier I could likely dictate this post to my phone and have it post via cellular Internet. I guess while technology has driven forward I have dropped off the pace a little. Truth be told I think once this year I actually responded to an email with the dreaded "I can't open that file."

I used to think my grandfather saw the most exciting period of technological change. If I remember correctly he was born in 1898 and got to see the birth of the automobile, air travel, space travel, telephone, television, air conditioning, computers, cell phones, and everything that leveraged those things. But maybe, quietly, our time has also seen equally important but somewhat less splashy improvements. Maybe.