Shiny Things - April 4th, 2008

08:11 pm - Progress

When I was in third grade, I read about lasers, and I wanted to have one of my own, but that seemed impossible. Almost ten years ago, I guess, I bought a laser pointer for $10 in a gas station convenience store. Today, while buying batteries for that laser, I saw in the checkout line that they were selling a laser, with two batteries, as a pet toy for $5. (My laser needs three batteries of the same batteries, which cost $2 each. So the actual cost of the laser is $1.) And I'm writing this on a computer that has an optical drive--and thus a laser--built into it, while I listen to our CD player that of course has a laser of its own.

I also saw a 64MB USB flash drive for $8. The first computer I used had 16KB, and didn't even have a drive: it was networked to a 32KB computer that shared its floppy drive (which wouldn't hold 1MB). I remember how excited people were in the early '90s when they could buy a 100MB hard drive for $100. Now I'm looking into building a new computer with 2-4GB of RAM.

I'm amazed. And then I remember that my grandmother was born before the airplane, and lived to see the moon landing. I wonder what I'll live to see?