Black is This Year's Pink

There is a small computer shop on 500 South in Bountiful. Coming home from work the other night, I noticed a sign in the window advertising a watch with a flash drive attached. It reminded me of a gift Dad received from one of his vendors: a pen with a flash drive in it. At first glance, it seems like a semi-logical idea. Right up to the point, that is, that you want to write something down while your pen is protruding from the front of a computer, at which point you need another pen. In the end, all you have is a low-capacity flash drive on top of a pen that doesn't work too well to begin with. It is also my guess, though I don't know for sure, that the designer of said pen/flash drive has never used a Dell desktop. Then again, I suppose most Dell USB ports are decorative, anyway.

It seems to me that flash drives are starting to fill the same role, technologically speaking, that calculators once held. The first computers that could perform basic, arithmetic functions were huge - literally filling rooms. Somewhere over the decades we were able to figure out how to put this same functionality in a minute chip that could be installed in almost any electronic device. Through the late-80s we seemed so giddy about our technological accomplishment that we slapped that $0.10 chip into everything we could think of. Gone were the days of enduring such laborious exercises as addition and subtraction and remembering to carry the remainder. It was advancement. It was progress. It was primeval man, conquering the Euclidean elements. It was a monument to man's spirit of achievement. A modern day Tower of Babel that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide any number smaller than six figures.

It was lame. When was the last time you bought a microwave because it had a calculator? Or a cell phone, for that matter? Even the calculator watches, which were right up there with cauliflower bangs, Hammer pants, and OP t-shirts when I was a kid, were a let down once you tried to use them since it was impossible to press less than three buttons at a time with anything bigger than a toothpick. My guess is that the only time most people consider a product's ability to perform basic, or even advanced, calculations is when they are purchasing (wait for it) a calculator. So it is with flash drives.

I would guess the only reason we haven't seen a pairing of these two products (calculators and flash drives) is that no one is certain whether it would be a calculator with an attached flash drive, or a flash drive with a calculator.

mw