Reply #41: I'm going to second the person above who said that Bell, among others

[XemaSab]

would not recognize a modern phone, the Wright brothers would be floored by modern airplanes, and Morse would not recognize today's communications technology.

IN MY LIFETIME I have gone from having a rotary landline to having a push-button landline with a corded receiver to having a cordless phone. Other people have also had briefcase cell phones and car phones, but those were yuppie toys when they were around. Now I have a cell phone smaller than my wallet that I can use to surf the 'net and play music. (And on edit, take pictures and send text messages!)

I went from having an 8 track and record player to having a tape player, a CD player, and then an iPod.

The first data storage systems I remember were the old large, thin floppy disks, then we got the smaller harder disks, then we got CD's, and now we have thumb drives.

The first computer I had was a black and white Mac Plus (with a 20XP dataframe! all for the low, low price of $3100!!!), and now I have a MacBook about the size of a paper notebook that I can use to access the internet anywhere where there's WiFi (and the downward size on those seems to be limited by the screen size and the keyboard size). (Furthermore, I'll be surprised if we're still using small WiFi hubs in 5 years.)

It's not like there have been small changes in design and efficiency for computing and communications; the changes in the last 25 years have been radical. A modern pocket calculator has more computing power than the lunar lander did, and the people who designed the Apollo Guidance Computer said that if they'd known what they were getting into, they would have thought that the project was impossible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Cars haven't kept up for the same reasons that we're still burning coal. There's a LOT of money to be made keeping things the way they are.