My husband and I spent quite a bit of time today moving back into our living room after a new paint job transformed the space.  During the course of our organizing and fall-cleaning, we rediscovered a bunch of gadgets:

– a Sony CD Car Discman (from 1995)

– a Sears camera (from the 1970s, when my father-in-law, who died in 1995 but spent his entire career with IBM, lived with his family in Poughkeepsie, NY)

– a couple of Olympus film cameras – one fancy, one not so fancy

– our first digital camera, by Minolta

– our first (and only) video cam, purchased when Chloe was born in 2001.

Chloe was perplexed by all of the gadgets.  I had an epiphany when I saw all of them displayed on our dining room table.  Not a particularly profound epiphany, mind you.  Rather, an epiphany of the “wow, I never really stopped to think about it in that way” kind of epiphany.   It was so simple, really.  The iPhone and its predecessors, starting with the first iPod, have taken over the world.  When once upon a time – and less than a generation ago – you needed at least three different devices to listen to music, take photos and make movies, you now only need one.

Pretty damn amazing.