Last week I turned 30 which means, some of you may deduce, that I was born in 1981. Since the 30th birthday is generally regarded as a momentous occasion I decided to gather up some other momentous occasions that have occurred during just my lifetime. I’ll list everything after 1981 together in no particular order, ’cause reading a whole bunch of lists is boring.
1981:
– The space-shuttle Columbia made its first mission flight (Wikilink)
– The PC to coin the phrase was released (Wikilink)
– MTV, a staple of my and many other’s teenage years launched
– Ms. Pac-Man released in the US.
– Michael Jackson was still black
After that:
– Halley’s comet arrived
– The Berlin wall fell
– There was the Chernobyl meltdown
– Neil Gaiman began writing Sandman
– Pathfinder landed in Mars and found
– Human Genome project started and was concluded (wikilink
– The Hubble space telescope was launched and has since been producing images like this one:
– Both PlayStation and XBox were first released
– Google launched and revolutionized the way we think about search engines.
– The first space tourist paid $20 million for a week-long stay at the International Space Station
– The Cern Large Hadron Collider made its virgin voyage
– The iPod emerged
– HIV and AIDS were recognized and a vaccine is forthcoming
– Nano-technology emerged and may eventually provide a cure for cancer
– The first “functional” androids can sing
During the time I have been walking on this planet, computer memory capacity has gone from a maximum of 256 kilobytes (and a hard drive of 10 megabytes) to a rough median of 4 gigabytes (a hard drive of hundreds of gigabytes). Cell phones have gone from this:
to this: 
That’s only the last 30 years. 30 years more and cell phones were pretty much science fiction and computers were the size of cars. What’s going to happen in the next 30 years? I can’t wait to find out.
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