Here in the Future

Today's Bizarro is sponsored by My New TV Series.

It is difficult for me to completely grasp, but Americans under 30-or-so cannot remember a time before computers were ubiquitous. I'm not all that old, as you can see from this dashing recent photo of me, but I never even saw a desktop computer in person until I was an adult and didn't learn to use one until I was in my thirties. Even hand-held calculators were rare and expensive when I was in high school. I learned to type on a typewriter like the one in this cartoon and the closest thing to spell-check that existed was my mom and a pocket dictionary.

I may sound like an old geezer but the speed at which technology has moved in the past 30 years makes a person's head spin. There is nothing to indicate that it will slow down in the near future, but at the current exponential rate that it is moving, sometime next month we'll have personal robots that respond to voice commands, be teleporting from coast to coast using only our thoughts, and the Internet will appear as a 3-D hologram hovering in front of us.

More to the point of this cartoon, computers actually did get too small to use. The most advanced cell phones of a only a couple years ago did everything the early desktop computers did but the keypads were so small and inefficient you might as well have been using Morse code and an abacus. Thank god for the ingenious new designs by Apple (again) and the new generation of phone screens and keyboards. How did we get by without them?

I know that when I describe the way my family and I lived when I was a kid, I sound like Abraham Lincoln reading by candlelight in a log cabin. But seriously, compared to now, we were practically barbarians squatting in tents in the wilderness. If you're currently a high school kid, chances are that by the time you're my age your description of today's Internet, email, texting, digital TV, etcetera, will seem like cavemen banging on logs with sticks. Get used to it.

That's if modern human civilization still exists by then, which is very unlikely, so never mind.