I have been using computers since my family purchased a Commodore Vic-20 back in the 1980’s. It did mostly nothing and what it could do took hours of typing, tape rewinding, and coaxing to get it to do it. Fast forward to the 1990’s when I started working in IT professionally and 100GB or so of disk could fit in a rack the size of a refrigerator. I could do a lot more, but it was slow and required a good deal of technical knowledge to do things.
About a month ago NASA tweeted out a high quality photo taken of a rover on Mars and it forced me to just take a moment to pause and marvel at how far we have come that I can view such a high quality photo from another planet.
Today was another day to marvel at how far we have come. First, I took this photo with a device the size of a Kit Kat Bar. I wanted to send this to my son who is in the US Navy and currently stationed in Diego Garcia. When I was in the USMC back in the late 80’s and 90’s, I was lucky to get to make a long distance phone call and if I did it would eat up a large portion of my income to do it. A photo would take months to send via the postal system. Today, I simply texted this from the same phone I took the photo from and nearly instantly my son gets that text on a tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean. We are truly living in the future.
