This post got me thinking. . .

This will date me quite a bit, but I remember being in a Radio Shack™ as a teenager (circa 1980) and looking at the venerable old TRS-80 personal computer. It had no mouse, no GUI, no windows, no colors. Just a green on black text-based monitor.

The TRS-80 had a response that it always gave if you typed a command in it that it didn't understand. It would respond with:

>What?

I remember looking at that TRS-80 and seeing the following text on its monitor:

>Request information on house plants

>What?

>Tell me about house plants

>What?

Someone who knew very little about computer capabilities at that time had decided to ask what they considered a very straightforward question to the computer. The TRS-80, of course, didn't understand the "command".

Fast forward. We now live in a world where you can open up an internet browser, type in "Request information on house plants", and get no fewer than 373,000 pages of information back in 0.19 seconds (I just tried).

This is magical. I'm not ancient yet (I'm 44), but there are so many things we consider completely commonplace that would have seemed like technological wizardry when I was in high school. Frankly, most of these things are things we would never have conceived of. Here are some examples. You don't have to be rich, by Western standards, to enjoy all of these:

• Most of us have access to a magical portal of information called the internet that will tell us about almost anything we might be interested in. In sub-second time
• A letter you've written to someone doesn't take three days to get there anymore. More like three seconds
• If you want to listen to almost any song recorded in the last forty or fifty years, you can hear 30 seconds of it or so for free. You can then, if you want to, buy that song for about a dollar and have it in your hot little hands within a few seconds
• You can place that song on a little device that is just a few inches square that can hold thousands of other songs
• And TV shows too. No, really.
• Now, follow me here: I've said you "place that song" on a device. But you never actually touch the song. It's not on a tape or record or anything. It's not really anything you can see or feel. You can just hear it. I mean, it's something, but not exactly. That probably doesn't make sense. I wish I could explain it better
• By the way, you probably have several hundred channels on your TV now
• And you also can rewind or pause TV shows without even having to commit them to a VCR tape first. Nice if you need to go to the bathroom or take a phone call or get a snack
• You can also just give your TV a schedule of shows to record for you, and watch them at your leisure. No VCR tapes required!
• Regarding taking phone calls, if you're like most people you probably carry a little miniature (would have looked miniature to us in 1981, at least) telephone that works almost everywhere. No cords. The closest example of what your phone probably looks like is a pocket-calculator. Only smaller
• It's likely your phone doesn't ring. I mean, it rings, but not with a ring, per se. It's likely your phone plays you a song when someone calls you. You can actually make it play a different song depending on who the caller is. Or, get this, if you want to be less obtrusive, you can just make it vibrate.
• Did I mention your phone is a camera too? I know that sounds like a very weird combination, but it's true.
• As a camera, it can hold a whole boatload of pictures. You don't have to get them developed, or even do the whole Polaroid strip off the emulsion thing. They just *are*.
• Because of this instant-feedback from your camera, you might possibly take a decent number of pictures of yourself
• And, since the pictures are essentially free, unlimited (remember the 24-rolls and 36-rolls of film? Forget 'em), and lightweight, you take a lot more pictures than ever before. Because taking and developing a picture is essentially free, you goof off a lot in pictures now. It's getting to the point where almost every picture you take is what we used to call the "crazy" picture. You and your friends have gotten very good at mugging for the camera
• And your phone might even play music for you, although it probably doesn't hold thousands of songs. Maybe just a hundred
• Quite possibly your phone also lets you look at that magic portal of information I mentioned in the first item, above
• Your phone also can send messages instantaneously to anyone else who's phone number you remember
• Except you don't really have to remember or write down phone numbers anymore
• In a Presidential campaign in 2008, a Presidential candidate actually sent messages out to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of phones to announce who his Vice Presidential candidate was. The messages were all "delivered" instantly. They probably played a little song too when they got to your phone. And, of course, everyone gets to pick their own song
• You might have just recently bought a phone with no buttons on it at all. You just touch its screen (yes, phone's have "screens" now, to show all those pictures, messages, and magic-portal pages we've talked about - the screen is in color, by the way) and it does stuff. Seriously, just touch it. You can actually drag little pictures around on it and make it do things.
• Your phone only weighs a few ounces. For real
• Finally . . . remember that diary you used to write in every day and keep locked up? Now you just write your deepest thoughts in the magic information portal I mentioned in the first item. And you're pretty much OK with anyone in the world reading what you wrote.

That list took me about a minute to think through, and I only touched on a couple specific areas of technology. There are probably a thousand other changes in the past 25 years or so that would have blown the younger, early 80's versions of ourselves right out of our sleeveless Ocean-Pacific T-shirts and parachute pants.

Feel free to add to the list in the comments.