Nearly everything we take for granted today could be considered high-tech, especially when looked at from the perspective of the past. When my siblings and I were young, our summers were spent outside playing with all of the neighborhood kids from dawn to dusk. We ate at whichever friend’s house we were closest to, and we went home when the streetlights came on. If our mom needed anything in particular from us during the day, she’d stand out on the back porch and blow a garden-variety referee’s whistle. We didn’t have any way of knowing which one of us she wanted; we all simply knew we had to get home when we heard Mom’s whistle.

The notion that our mom could have personally contacted us with a phone that we could carry in our pockets would have been straight out of The Jetsons. The fact that the same little portable phone could deliver messages via voice and/or text, take photos, and access the Internet (wait, there was no such thing)—would have literally blown our little minds.