If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute. It’s been heard in Florida, Michigan, California, Texas, and basically every location imaginable. It’s most likely an evolution of a Mark Twain quote, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” Well, it’s time once again for Fred and Patrick to blatantly steal from others and apply it to VoIP. So, with this amazingly long-winded introduction, we say…

If you don’t like the current telephone technology, wait a few minutes.

Imagine the technology we use and take for granted today. And now think how kids today believe that the old phone you have plugged into the wall is as antiquated as an 8-track tape (if they know what that is).

When floppy drives came out in the late 1970’s, people were blown away. And of course, we mean the new and improved smaller and portable 5 1/4 inch floppies. The ones you can easily fit in your briefcase or backpack. And if you were really lucky, you could fit that great word processing document on about 3 or 4 of them! And then, just a few years later (1983), a new smaller 3.5 inch floppy came out that could hold 4 times as much and wouldn’t split in half if you accidentally sat on it.

Then we went to CD’s where we could write over 700mb to one small disk. This was the equivalent of more than 500 floppies. Of course, you couldn’t reuse the CD as easily as the floppy, but it was a lot easier to carry 1 CD than a box of multi-colored 80’s data disks.

Today, kids think that CD’s are antiquated. They use small USB flash drives capable of storing tremendous information in the size of a lipstick tube.

So, on 1 little flash drive you can store an entire high quality episode of The West Wing, several episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or hours of podcasts from Voip Tech Chat. All on one little drive you can fit on your key chain, for about the price of a key chain!

You can pick up a good USB drive for under 25 dollars. Now, at Voip Tech Chat (.com), we are not economists. In fact, Fred’s grade in Economics — well that’s for another day — but as these products have gotten better and better, the price of storage has dropped astronomically (interestingly, Fred aced astronomy). Let’s use our favorite shows (The West Wing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as an example.

Let’s pretend that Fred’s still living in the 80’s and Patrick is living in the present (this would mean that Fred would still have hair, though not as much as Patrick). Now the storage size of a 44 minute episode at “decent” computer quality is about 200 MB. So, Fred will be storing his favorite episode of Buffy on floppies while Patrick stores Bartlett’s administration using today’s technology. Fred’s will need more than $140.00 worth of Floppy Disks to store his episode (and not to mention how he’ll carry 100+ disks) while Patrick needs less than $1.00 to put his episode on a CD or DVD. Additionally, some guy who isn’t involved in the show, can put the both Fred’s Buffy’s and Patrick’s West Wing on his thumb drive, and still have room for enough music to drive across the country and back.

The beauty of technology, is we continually gain more for less cost.

Recent reports show that the “traditional” phone companies lost more than 10 million subscribers last year to VoIP alone (even more people decided to unplug their home phones and just use cell phones). As VoIP technology continues to grow, and VoIP adapters (ATA) continue to provide more features (at a lower cost), how far are we from seeing a generation that won’t understand what a phone cord is?

What will we answer when they ask why we would tether ourselves to a wall when they are calling from a 0-carbon footprint car while eating a renewable, soy-based, vegan, no-meat burger out of a water-soluble starch-based bag?

But, more importantly, will they still recognize that Ben Affleck rocked in Daredevil?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS