New Technology Trends

I'm a baby boomer. I grew up in the dinosaur age of electronics. When I tell younger folks today that I never saw a color television set until I was well into my teens, they look at me like I just crawled out from under a rock.

At my first job as a restaurant manager, I had to use one of those old adding machines to do all of the math that was involved with my job. I finally went out and bought a Texas Instruments hand held calculator to figure percentages. It was an early model and cost me quite a bit of change.

I grew up in the age of tube-type TV's, transistor radios, and eight track tape players. There were no cell phones. I pods, or computers. We listened to music on vinyl records. I remember when video cameras cost a fortune and were big and clunky. I bought the first top-loading video tape player and recorded movies off of my 13-inch color TV. I thought I was styling.

But now technology is moving so fast you almost can't keep up with it all, especially someone like me. And the problem is that it's all disposable. In the past you kept a television set for at least twenty years. If it broke down, you simply went up to the corner drugstore and bought a new tube. Now we throw our electronics away even when they still work because they become obsolete overnight.

Here are a few of the top technology items that have come up over the past year, according to CNN:

"In January, the world met a gadget called the iPad. In late December, federal regulators implemented groundbreaking rules for how the internet works. In between, there were smarter phones, video games that make you actually stand up and do something and ... oh, yeah ... a little Web site called Facebook signed up a few more users."

Facebook triumphed over MySpace and sprinted past Google as the world's most visited web site. Facebook's starter was named "Person of the Year" and a major motion picture that grossed $90 million was made.

Apps for Smartphones were big this year, especially check in apps like Foursquare and Facebook Places. Facebook messaging is even taking the place of a lot of emails.

I remember playing the Atari Pong game. It was real exciting. You watched a little white square move slowly from one side of the screen to the other. It was a big gaming revolution when the first asteroids game came out. At least with that you could shoot something.

But with all of the video games of the past you were tied to the box with the wires that came out of the controllers. Now the new trend is that everything is hands-free. It all started with the Wii. There is also the possibility that games that require some kind of physical exertion may actually compete with the fantasy stuff.

What's left on the horizon? Well, 3d is big now and I think that games that allow the character to appear right in your living room in 3D aren't very far off. In a word: holograms. That way you can have your favorite rock band play just for you and you can walk around the lead singer and check out his butt.

But that original Atari Pong game is now selling for big bucks as well as some other classic games from the prehistoric period. Are we about to go retro?

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/27/top.tech.trends.year/index.html?hpt=T2