1339 Speeding

If you’ve ever felt that time has been moving faster than usual consider this. We are moving faster than time. Or at least doing a lot more things in the same span of time.
I was reading an article not long ago in which an elderly lady talked about how great it was when they first got a horse-driven carriage. They could make it from Hawks Prairie to downtown Olympia and back in 8 hours.
And this was before the freeway backups from Fort Lewis.
Our new gadgets are the same way. More megabits moving faster in smaller spaces. It cost $1500 for five, count ‘em five, megabytes of storage in 1980. Then you got so you only had to pay $50 for a 10-pack of 1.44 megabyte hardshell diskettes. Today that same 50 bucks will buy you a 32-gigabyte thumbdrive. Which is the equivalent of a stack of floppies taller than the Tacoma Narrrows bridge.
Of course all that tinyness has a greater cosmic purpose. To make our cellphones better. From the brick-sized model of 1983 that weighed almost 2 pounds, cost $4000, and drained it’s battery in an hour, we’ve got a lot smarter indeed.
Today’s phones also save our aching backs by consolidating a lot of other important devices. The iPhone 4 replaces 80s gadgets like the Polaroid camera, the Handycam, the Walkman, the Watchman, the Atari 2600, (I love a phone with Space Invaders) and a Sharp Wizard. And here’s the kicker. Just one of today’s iPhones packs more memory than all of the Apple II computers in the world in 1980.
So with all of that extra time we have, why doesn’t it feel slower? And if it’s going so fast, why aren’t I having fun?
America, ya gotta love it.