It all started back in 1989 when a co-worker had a Mac Plus and brought it to work.  I had no idea really what it would do or why I needed it, I only knew that I needed it.  I drove from Seattle to Portland to buy it so I didn’t need to pay sales tax.  I had made sure that I purchase the external floppy drive, which was about 4 or 5 dollars as I remember because I needed to be able to copy and transfer data easily.  I had no idea what that meant at the time, only that I needed that too!  Later, I decided that I couldn’t handle the transferring of data so I purchased a 20 MB hard drive that was about the size of a shoe box and clipped onto the back of my computer.  With amazement my friends looked at it in wonderment exclaiming there was no way I would ever need that much storage space.

I also purchased a carrying case which allowed my computer to be “transportable” so I could use it while in hotel rooms on business travel.  I had become the master of spreadsheets and voiced that I no longer needed manila folders!  All was fine until I discovered a little thing called AOL, this allowed me to communicate to the world.  Back in the day AOL charged by the hour, not monthly.  I had bills that were $150 a month cranking out data on a 2.4K modem I had picked up.  And you didn’t need the World Wide Web because AOL had everything anyone could possibly ever need contained within its imaginary walls.

To my amazement there was life outside of my Mac Plus, I discovered a car phone!  This was a cool phone that came in a bag that looked like a purse that allowed me to plug it into my cigarette lighter and make calls.  I carried that around with me for fear someone might steal it from my car, it looked like a man purse.  But the first person to say something would have to deal with me pulling out the phone like John Wayne pulling out a revolver.  Meer men would fear me.  Add another $150 a month to my growing list of gadget bills.

Here I am today 20 years later, I know longer use a Mac and have transformed myself to the life of PC (for better or worse) and carry my iPhone around.

I say to the group as I finish my comments, “I don’t have a problem; my laptop next to my bed isn’t an umbilical cord.  I can leave it at the office whenever I want”.

I venture that some people might say their HDTV, laptop or cell phone.  The interesting thing about technical gadgets is that functionality and feature rich are things that companies and consumers tend to look for.  HDTV or TVs in general are really one dimensional.  You still need other gadgets to make them reach their full usefulness, such as DVRs, Blu Ray, cable boxes, etc.  As a stand alone product it misses the mark.  Your desktop or laptop computer really adds functionality and features in well, so you can do work, watch TV programs, surf the Internet and many other things.  So in my humble opinion this is the better choice by far of the two.  The third option and in my opinion is a fully functional cell phone.

Cell phones not only allow you to talk, but you can run work applications on them, check email, play games, watch TV, track your position, monitor your children and many, many other things.  But not only is the product feature rich, it’s reliable and small.

So for me, if I was playing the children’s game ‘what if’ I would definitely choose the cell phone.  Somehow it doesn’t seem nearly as difficult to come clean with this as it did for me when I was a kid and had to come clean with the object of my affection.