I remember receiving my first GameBoy. The light green colored screen and the power-on lock button are some of the finer things about the unit that stick out in my mind. Nevermind the maroon colored button schema that has now become a household name with any person owning a gaming console worldwide. It was then that I was first introduced to the power of portability. Fast forward a few years and come to about 10 years ago when I was once again introduced to something a little more wonderous, a PocketPC. Most people think that this device never really reached its peak because of the user-base and its rather clunky size with a very opulent PalmOS on it, but I thought that it held great promise. A stylus navigated you through the operating system and let you perform operations that back then seemed like rocket science. I owned a Palm at the time and happily totted my prized possession around taking notes and keeping a strict contacts folder. It was around that time that people even started adapting to the fact that laptops were going to be the mode of operation for most college students as well. Now, lets come to the present day. I find it hard to fathom a world in which we don't have a mobile device as part of our daily lives. Our cellphones, sorry smartphones, have become such an integral part of our work and personal lives that we probably couldn't do away with them even if we wanted to. Most technical feats are now finding their way to mobile phones and whether it be an Android-based phone or something that the boys at Apple churn out, we all have one.
Today, for the umpteenth time, i have loaded my most favorite operating system of the moment on a laptop with no operating system. The catch? It all resides on my USB stick and never actually touches my hard-drive. The joke? I don't even need a hard drive to use it. If you haven't already checked it out, Google is releasing a new operating system called Chromium OS that allows users to connect to a Cloud-Like service offering the user the ability to worry about absolutely nothing except turning on the machine and then getting to work. When I look back on it all, I wonder whether somewhere along the way, we decided that the complexities weren't wowing us anymore so we shifted our focus on ease of use. Is this a good move? I don't know really. Some people like to claim that everyone should be able to use anything while some others believe that the magic of using a complicated device lies in the ability to manipulate every last level offered by the device.
It also leads me to believe that we spent all these years making things better when all we really needed was something simple ... enter the first GameBoy and reset the cycle.
Music listened to while writing this post - Nothing
