iPad

John got an iPad this week. That thing is amazing! My initial thought was that it was just a big iPhone. I have one of those and I love it but I didn't see the point in having a bigger version of it. Then when John got it and I played with it, holy moly. It's so cool. You can watch movies on it, surf the internet, load your music, download books, read magazines, newspapers...the list goes on! It doesn't do as much as a laptop but it's not nearly as expensive either. Technology sure has come a long way.

That got me thinking. I got my first accounting job back in 1992. I was a Staff Accountant and I had a PC on my desktop. It had an ugly orange cursor. We did schedules in Lotus 123 but to format the schedules, we had to log into wysiwyg. It's an acronym "What you see is what you get". The formatting options were pretty slim. There was no internet and we had no network. What was on my machine was only on my machine. We had floppy disks that were huge! That was how I would copy files from one computer to another. Then they came out with "floppy disks" that were 3 1/2" hard disks that were more durable and portable. Not that this did me any good because I didn't have a PC at home. Nobody did.

A few years later, I decided that I "had" to have a PC so I bought one. It was a Compaq 486. Anyone remember those? It cost me about $3,000. It had windows but no other software. At this point, the internet was not something that a lot of people knew about. I also bought a Laserjet printer that only printed black & white. This was a huge deal. I kept a schedule of my bills and...OH yeah! I bought software so that I could make greeting cards.

At my next accounting job, all the accountants had PCs on their desks and they had windows. This company was cutting edge. We also had a small network in that from our PC, we could log into this software called GEAC. The accounts payable people had terminals that logged directly into the software. No PCs for them.

Around this time, the internet was all the rage. Over the phone line, you could log on to something called AOL (America on Line). It tied up your phone line and if you had call waiting, you'd sometimes get disconnected from the internet. I can't remember how much it cost per minute but it was pretty expensive. I got a free trial membership to AOL and I logged on. There were these things called chat rooms where you could talk to other people that were logged on as well. The chat rooms would be topic specific so all those logged into the chat rooms would have something in common. I thought the whole thing was kind of boring so I let my membership expire.

There was also this thing called "e-mail". You could send messages electronically. It was all the rage because people would send jokes and notes to one another and it was immediate. At FirstWorthing, we had one email address for the entire company. All the emails came into one location and our IT guy would distribute them. Seriously. Shortly after that, we all got email addresses. It was so cool!

Fast forward a few years. Right before John & I got married in 2000, we moved in together. Sounds worse than it is. It was really a timing issue. But we had internet access - dial up. He asked me what I thought about getting cable internet. The internet access was over the cable network. I just kind of pooh-poohed it because I never went on the internet. Basically what that meant was the internet was "on" all the time. We didn't have to use the phone line to surf the web. Interesting.

Once we got use to having it, we were crushed when the cable went out. When we moved to our new house, we weren't in an area that had cable internet so we had to go back to dial up. That was tragic! By this time, we had stopped using phone books, stopped just showing up at places in hopes that they were open, etc. We looked everything up online. Everything is online. Times have changed.

Now we have one PC, three laptops, two iPhones and an iPad. Last year I did all my Christmas shopping on line. I never left the house. Now, my whole job is done over the internet. My Sunday newspaper is half the size it used to be because all the news is online. I pay all my bills online. If I say "I wonder..", John says "google it". That means look it up on the web. The world has changed because of the internet. I can access the internet with my phone. John can sit on the couch, download a book, order a pizza and pay the phone bill all over the web. We've come a long way, baby!