When I was fairly young and impressionable, I think I lived through a time that was staggeringly good for technophiles. We went from Pong to Atari 2600s to Super Nintendos by the time I was in college. Computer games went from things I had to type in line by line out of books or the backs of magazines — and this seemed entirely reasonable — to Star Control 2, available at retail stores boxed, playable on a desktop PC.

Right now, because I have issues with work-life boundaries, I’m using VPN and remote desktop to get into my box at work on a connection that’s 2,500 times faster than the first modem I ever used. I have a complete and functional desktop that belongs to a docked laptop, a not-that-super Dell model that’s still a couple pounds and incomprehensibly more powerful than the first PC I used (or every computer I ever used until I touched mainframes at college) — and from there remoting again into a lab server to do some troubleshooting, and that lab server isn’t actually a piece of hardware at all, it’s all virtualized… my mind swims just thinking about it.

I’ve always had faith in this march of progress. My dad once told me to always buy the largest storage devices I could, because “mass storage is never massive enough”. I started using 8″ floppy drives that held 80k if I remember, and today I carry a 16GB USB key and I can buy terabyte (well, not reaaaallly) hard drives for under a hundred dollars.

Of course I’m writing science fiction. I don’t know how I couldn’t.