The Generations in my family

I'm amazed at the blistering pace of technological change. Back in the late 90's I tried one of the best dictation programs. After installing the data from a CD, which took almost an hour, I sat and "trained" the program to understand my voice by reading a couple of paragraphs into the tiny external computer mike several times, another 20 minutes invested. I tried the program out. The software interpreted me correctly about 80% of the time. Now my household routinely dictates questions, movie selections and more into various devices without a hitch.

Even between children, the changes are amazing. My oldest was born in 1997. Here are some "pages" from the World Wide Web in that year.

These pages use bulleted text lists and underlined word links by and large. These pages were accessed through a 33K baud modem that would send handshake tones to the local ISP. Hearing these tones through the computer speaker meant every piece was working.

My youngest was born in 2002. Here are Yahoo and Alta Vista of that year. Bulleted lists have been replaced by style pages with many more links and graphics. We accessed these pages through a 56K baud modem. My youngest doesn't remember the handshaking sounds, while my oldest does.

In 2007 we signed up for Netflix streaming. We still used a 56K modem and waited overnight for a movie to download, but NO late fees. Kate remembers waiting for movies, Emily not so much. We also used a local video rental store that had 100s of DVDs on hand and late fees. We watched one go out of business thanks to Netflix.