I got to thinking about the movie Back to the Future last night. When I first saw the movie, oh I don’t know, about two decades ago, I loved it. The flying cars and other such technologies were all fine and dandy, but the one that I loved most was the video telephone. Actually seeing people as you talked to them– who would have thought it!

But that was twenty years ago. Now not only are we looking at people and speaking to them on our screens, we’re actually doing it while we sit in bed, cook in the kitchen, or drink latte at the local coffee shop. No need to even be stuck to a room. And we’re doing it for free. The movie Back to the Future now seems like it was quite pessimistic in thinking about what we could do with technology.

I am, of course, your very own neighborhood geek. I love my Macbook, I try out new things as soon as they become available (Twitter, anyone?), I signed up for, became active on, and deleted a social networking account all before it caught on (and then I had to do it all over again!) But there’s also that pull from the past.

I often download programs that give me a feel of the era gone by, especially when it comes to my writing. I’ve recently discovered a wonderful program– WriteRoom. It’s a basic little word processor that makes your entire screen go black. The words you type appear in green (or any other color you want), and that’s pretty much all it does. You can feel like you’ve gone back to the days before Windows, writing DOS-style.

Isn’t that something?

One day, not too far into the future, we’re going to have technology that we’ve always thought of in science fiction terms. I just hope we don’t lose some of the good stuff along the way.