I was putting blue nail polish on my nails the other night and was suddenly struck by the advances that have gone on in my life time. The things that the munchkin will never have to experience and may even think that I’m making up when I tell him how things used to be.

While he probably won’t ever care that it used to take about twenty minutes for nail polish to dry on your fingers instead of barely thirty seconds I imagine that he will be incredulous of the fact that phones used to be chained to not only the house but the walls and had rotary dials rather than push screens or the ability to call someone just because you ask them too.

I imagine also that he will not understand about records. In this age of ipods and phones that play mp3s it’s going to be really hard for him to imagine a large disc the size of your head with grooves that ran on a needle and not lasers, or that when his mother was a child they didn’t even have walkmans until she was almost eight and they used cassette tapes not digital information.

I see the way he asks to immediately see the pictures on the digital camera when we take them so the idea of film completely alien. I remember when we used to have to wait FOUR days to see the pictures we had taken and be so SO very careful with the camera so that the film wasn’t exposed otherwise the pictures were GONE. He found some negatives the other day that had wound up in a box in his room and, of course, there was no hope of explaining what they were and why he shouldn’t touch them or eat them.

I remember also my first computer. It was just a monitor, and not a flat screen monitor, a BIG HULKING monstrosity of a monitor that my mother and I could barely lift, and it had a keyboard, but no tower or hard drive box. The keyboard was almost two inches thick because the computer’s memory system was inside it and it also had to have space to hold the cassette tapes which ran the games. The games would take about ten minutes to load and were all in 64-bit pixels. There was no Windows on the computer not even 3.1 it had no GUI at all when it booted up the screen was just blue and yellow and all the commands ran in DOS. I used to sit for hours typing in strings of commands to make the computer play guessing games with me like “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” or make it run fireworks shows on it’s screen. Now those sort of screen savers are common place if not tame.