The Evolution Of Correspondence

My sister left for Germany fourteen years ago to be a nanny (for a year) and she never came back. She ended up falling in love with a German farmer (who was the uncle to the boys she was in charge of) and has lived there ever since.

Back in 1995, the phone rates to Germany were roughly $2.00/minute. Needless to say, phone calls were few and far between. The internet wasn't a popular thing back then, so we did things the old fashion way - we wrote letters and plunked them in the mail box. Within a year or so, my parents bought a fax machine and holy canoli! was that ever cool! We still hand wrote the letters, but it was sooooo neat how it could reach Jenn in a matter of minutes!

In the summer of 1997, my parents finally got connected to the internet and so began the email exchanges. And you could even send pictures! I remember being so amazed at seeing pictures of my nephew shortly after he was born. For the past 12 years, we've stayed connected with my sister with email and phone calls (the rates have dropped dramatically since 1995).

When my parents started their world travels three years ago, we kept in contact through email (I couldn't imagine my parents being gone for months at a time and only having sporadic phone calls to keep in touch). This year, we've added a new feature to the correspondence saga...Skype. It's basically video calling, but the extra feature is that you can phone people's landlines or cell phones from your computer (Skype is free from computer-to-computer, but you do have to pay if you want to phone landlines).

So this time around, I've been able to chat with my mom while she sits in the lobby of her hotel/castle in Ireland. She walked around the lobby with the laptop and showed me all the cool features of the castle. On the flip side, I can take our laptop downstairs and show her the progress with the basement renos. As we get working on Baby's room, I'll show her that as well. Of course, most importantly, I can also show her my belly as it continues to grow and she doesn't have to feel like she's missing out on the tail end of my pregnancy :-)

My grandma often talks about how her generation has watched the world go from horse and buggy to the automobile and from radios to internet. It makes me wonder what kind of technological evolution our generation will witness?