As I sit here Twittering from my touchscreen PDA wondering if I can afford the iPhone’s unlimited access data plan, I begin to reflect on how fast things have changed. I reflect on what slowed their transition.

I remember watching the first 10 years of TV programing in only two colors. Our Saturday morning cartoons and most everything else we watched was on an old black and white television my sister had been given a decade earlier. Later, I remember getting our first color television for our house when our parents finally picked one up at a garage sale in 1995. I was 13.

We had a full color TV in the living room, but access was limited to the times of the day when the parents weren’t watching it.

In college, to get my urban roommates rolling with laughs, I’d try to describe how we got our broadcasts back home over the airwaves. Literally, the kinds of radio transmissions that require huge gaudy antennas to catch. They look like something NASA would strap to the side of the Mars Lander, but bigger.

There was only a single channel we received in clarity, as in it wasn’t constantly peppered with snowing interference and background sounds of static feedback. It was CBS, Channel 12, in Binghamton.