About 30 years ago, my dad met my mom in Singapore. When my mom decided to move to Canada to study, this made communication between them a slight problem, since there was now an entire ocean between them. To solve this problem and talk to my mom, my dad had to travel for over an hour to get to the Singapore airport. This was because the residential phones back then weren’t capable of making long distance telephone calls to Canada. The long distance telephone equipment was only installed at major communication hubs such as the airport. Once at the airport, he’d have to reserve a phone booth and wait for the operator to make a connection to Canada. Once connected, he could only talk for about 3 or 4 mins, since that one call would cost him about $20 Singapore dollars. Adjusted for inflation, and converted to US dollars, this works out to be close to $50 for a 3 minute phone call. Not sure if I did the math right, but suffice to say… it was very expensive. 

Fast forward to today, and I’m in Vancouver BC visiting my parents, while she stayed in Washington DC (we couldn’t get our timetables and vacation days sync’d, blah). It’s certainly not quite the same distance my parents had between them (an ocean), but it still is one coast to another. So just before dinner, I walked into my parents’ living room, opened my Macbook Pro (with built in camera), connected to the wireless connection, and then used iChat to start a video conference with her to catch up with our day. Compared to my dad 30 years ago, the total time I spent was probably about the same. Except I didn’t have to travel for an hour just to chat for a couple minutes. Instead, I travelled maybe 15 feet at most to chat (with video!) for about an hour. And the cost to set this up was free!

This is one of the reason I love working with technology, there’s just so much cool stuff happening. I’m excited to see were we’ll be in the next 30 years… maybe we’ll finally get our flying cars by then