“The best things in life are not things”
by unknown author

Just watched the first bits of Bill Gates keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in the US. He was showcasing some really interesting technologies where your personal information could be transferred from one to another seamlessly. Instead of a mouse, you could just point your finger to a screen or table and drag it across as if you could physically move it.

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I’m thinking back 7 years when I got my first laptop. How much technology has changed for me since then. Heh.

I had a 12.1″ DSTN screen that looked fuzzy when it displayed something with a lot of motion. I was always running out of space on the 800 x 600 pixel screen. Today I’m using dual LCD screens, a 17″ Samsung and a monster Dell 24″ that makes DVDs look a little pixelated, and a total workspace of 3200 x 1200 pixels.

I had a 1.44GB HD, a third of which was eaten by Windows. Now I have a massive 220GB worth of storage and that’s nothing compared to the 300GB drives which come quite cheaply these days.

I had a finicky 10x CD ROM drive which was flakey with CD-Rs of the day. 700MB seemed like a great deal back then. Now my Pioneer DVD writer produces 4.7GB DVDs in under 8 minutes.

I had a 33.6k modem and everyone at high school always tried to find software or tweaks get that extra little bandwidth from downloading stuff. One paid for a dialup connection by the second and when you dialup you hope you get a good connection that wasn’t lossy. Now I have a 1.5Mbps ADSL connection, and you can browse and download stuff off the Internet without worrying about maximising the efficiency of the connection.

Heh, not boasting about my computer, but technology has leaped by lightyears in the last 7 years. We lived with 1.44MB floppies for a long while, then CDs and Zip disks became the rage. Now, everyone has a USB thumbdrive that stores 100x more than your old floppy with less chance of the data becoming corrupted. Some of these flash devices double as a portable music players with hours of listening pleasure at your disposal.

Technology has altered our lives in a very significant way. Only 30 odd years ago, kids would still be playing outside and mingling with other people. These days, kids handle computers and game consoles like a second limb. Interaction is virtual and there is less of a human touch, I find it distances us from interacting socially with people on a more personal level (heh, I’m quite a part of that geeky generation as it is).

Sometimes I worry about the social and ethical implications of technology, yet I still marvel the innovations of our time. Just wondering what the next 7 years will be like.

PS. The title is Intel Corporation’s new marketing tag. No longer is it “intel inside”. This is a whole other topic on the saturation of computer processors. Processing speeds these days are adequate to accommodate the basic needs of most people so people do not need to upgrade as often, hence driving once very high margins down. Intel is diversifying into other devices, like mobile phones and making that set top box for your living room. Even a behemoth like Intel needs to adapt to the times and anticipate customer demands before the customer even realises he/she needs it. Heh, I can think of how to apply all my Commerce training in this discussion.