I must be proud that members of my family pretty much rule the world. We are now an unavoidable part of everything that runs the planet, from taking financial decisions to conducting life saving medical surgeries and from guiding mass murderous missiles to enabling terrorists in executing their vicious plans, we are involved. However, I am not so happy of the fact that it’s just about 30 years since my generation started in my family and I already see that we are fast being neglected.

I am the Laptop and I belong to the family of computers.

Though the exact year of my birth is still not traceable and along with it the person who created me. It is widely accepted that it was Adam Osborne who created the first of my kind in 1981 that reached a commercially viable scale. It was called Osborne-1 a cute fat looking model. Xerox PARC made an handsome NoteTaker a few years before Osborne but was too expensive to be produced at a larger scale.
Since then, my generation popularly know as the Laptops was the craze. Our presence made our older generation Desktops to feel lesser. Not priced for the common man, we were the pride of the white collared humans. In the 90s and first decade of the millennium, the CEOs and CFOs of organizations flaunted our company. All my cousins occupied the plush board rooms and got to visit the greatest hotels acroos the globe while it was actually our older relatives called the servers sitting in a highly guarded prison like atmosphere called data centers who slogged through the night to provide the actual information needed for those meetings.

Little did I know that our limelight years are coming to an end when we were mass produced and started to replace some of our immediate previous generation, desktops. I was able to see the development of my next generation sitting in the same plush rooms where plans were hatched to replace my generation with my juniors in a very short time. Though they still are not reachable for a common man, my juniors known around as tabs are taking over our territory quickly. Sorry to see that unlike my generation which though went around the town still upheld our tradition and identity of having exclusive keyboards and not marrying anyone outside the family the new generations are unpredictable. I cannot easily now differentiate a member from the  family of telephones from one of my own kind. They marry and blend so much that a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) considered one of our kind is capable of calling anyone in the contact list thus behave like a phone. I even see them shedding the primary organ we had, keyboard. It is all built-in and blended as part of  the touch screen display. They are testing limits of interactions even using handwriting and voice recognition.

Hard to believe that the top offices already see us as embarrassment to hang around with. They prefer the younger, sleek and slimmer tabs to be their companions while we are left at a point where we are not capable of crunching heavy numbers like the servers who are still housed in the much respected data centers nor comfortable co-workers to stay at someone’s desk for 8 hours job like the desktops. We now serve as a back-up of our desktop relatives at work places and as their substitutes when people choose to work from home a few hours in a day.

With a heavy heart I must accept the truth behind Moore’s Law, a rule of thumb in the history of computing hardware whereby the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Such speed of growth in technology leads to such a speedy replacement of generations, we like it or not.