Remember how citizens of the 1820s made all that fuss over their steam engines and cotton gins? That was the infancy of the industrial revolution and yet people of the time marveled at the "modern" age they were living in some thought that either the human race had reached the limits of its potential or that the human race had gotten "too big for its britches" and was displeasing God.
I am old enough to remember when hand-held calculators were a big deal back in 1974. I was one of the first ones to take one into my 6th grade class and all the other kids (including my teacher) crowded around my desk to see this marvel for themselves. This calculator not only did the four basic math functions but it had a percentage and square root key as well. This was big stuff back then. My teacher had me input some "complicated" problems to try to fool it but it spit back the right answer, always. So long as the answer didn't consist of more than 8 digits. Also, this calculator had bright red LEDs and sucked up batteries faster than laptops do today.
Now flash forward about 20 years to the day I brought home my first home computer. This was only about 12 years ago. This computer costed nearly $3,000 and it sported 4MB of RAM, a 20MHz 486 processor and a whopping 129MB hard drive. It also had a 2400bps modem that I hooked up to Prodigy with (at $3.60 an hour). This was before most of us even knew what the Internet was.
This was only 12 years ago!
Today, I have many computers in the house including the one I am typing this out on. This computer has 2 gigabytes of RAM, two 300GB hard drives, a 3 gigahertz processor and a 21 inch LCD screen. With a Bose speaker system that would blow my 1993 era home stereo away. My entire record collection (some 1200 albums and 15,000 songs) takes up maybe a quarter of one of my two hard drives.
One can only guess what a typical computer of 12 years from now will be like. I'm guessing that storage space will be measured in terrabytes and it will be possible to store pretty much every book and piece of music ever written for starters.
Our technology is exploding so fast we'll be ahead of some alien races soon. Is the movie INDEPENDENCE DAY a metaphor for US as the invading aliens? Seriously though, ever thought about color wavelengths as pixel "binary" storage vs the ancient 01100111 bit/bytes of morse code? It comes from the ENIAC days of high thermal noise in vacuum tubes : on/off as max signal. How many different colors can be expressed in a TV pixel, then 500 pixels/line and 500 lines = a BIG number expressed in a single TV picture. Then there's sound frequencies, odors; to wit, WE are still the premier general purpose computer walking around, why not copy a succesful model, instead of dit-dah-dit Q-bits, nanotubes?
Yeah I remember thinking I was hot sh!t with my 486 and 16 megs of ram on my 30 meg hard drive!