Channeling my Grandparents
You know how when you grew up, your parents and grand-parents always said stuff like "I remember when I was a kid, we didn't even have X", where X was airplanes, or TV's or ice or whatever. I actually found myself having one of those moments in the OfficeMax store today. I remember when I got my first hard drive for my IBM PC in the very early 80's. It was 10MB, cost about $500, and my one thought at the time was "I'll never be able to fill up this thing".
Today at the office supply store at the register I made an impulse purchase for a new USB memory key. My son stole mine to use to take stuff back and forth to school, and I wanted a larger capacity drive anyway. So here I was buying a 1GB key, with 100x the storage of that first hard drive in a package about 1/100 of the size of that hard drive, and I was buying it at the cash register from a rack next to the gum. Pretty cool.
However, I am not going to let scientists totally off the hook. I am still waiting for my hover car, my jet pack, and my vacation on the moon, which I expected to have long before now.
Neal Phenes:
I am almost 50 and do that "when i was kid" stuff all the time with my 7 and 5 year olds. Usually, it is regarding having only B&W TVs. My daughter wanted to know what a telegram was when it was mentioned in an old book we were reading together. I described it as like an e-mail. Finding a modern item that a child would recognize in order to describe an obsolete product is very difficult. She has never seen an LP played. I cannot wait to set my turntable up in the basement. She'll probably think it is cool. Are new CDs still called albums today?
August 29, 2005, 1:28 pm