Today, as I was unpacking my remote mouse, I was briefly taken back to the time when I was a freshman, opening up my computer for the first time.
'Twas a time of wonderment and discovery.
And by now all of the wonders are commonplace or obsolete and discoveries unimportant.
This year's freshmen are showing up with computers much more powerful than mine, with capapbilities and speeds mine merely shadow.
With that in mind, let's think about the class that will out-do them.
Soon, freshmen will be showing up with even more powerful computers than the Pentium II or iMac beasts there are now. They'll sit down in the morning, watch Good Morning America while sipping their breakfast Dr. Peppers.
Then they'll pull out the ol' homework program, and while surfing the web, finish the week's assignments in applications FirstClass could only dream of becoming.
The room phone will be plugged into the computer, and speakerphones standard. No longer will there be people talking on cordless phones in the hallways... the people in the hallway will be those ousted from their rooms by a roommate talking to the computer.
Study breaks will be easy to come by. The computer of the future freshman has a DVD drive (Heck, some of this year's have them) and cable access so whether it be Starship Troopers or Jerry Springer that he wants to watch, it's there at his fingertips.
Feeble services like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger will long since have been replaced by some sort of Microsoft Messenger 2000. Mark my words.
So after a full day of computing, the freshman of the future will get up to get a late night snack.
Except he's stuck to his chair.
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