The Commodore 64 Children

I was a C64 child, I suspect many readers out there were too. What's noticeable about that generation is how technically far behind we left a lot of our parents generation. My parents were not technical, I on the other hand was sitting indoors hammering out GOSUB commands in C64 BASIC when I should have been outside getting more sunshine.

You grow up, get a job during the boom, and move on with your life happy knowing you're a king in this brave new  digital world. That was right up until I hooked up a Nintendo Wii earlier tonight, and all of a sudden the future looks scary.

When you consider that a generation of children are going to cut their teeth not writing software, but on visualizing and consuming information in the fashion which I've just seen, it makes what I'm doing now which is sitting behind a large Apple Cinema Display hammering out stuff on a keyboard, seem pretty dumb.

I decided to check the weather on the Wii Weather channel as I'm flying out to San Francisco this weekend for the RSA Conference. Do I select a list of cities? No. It shows me a map zoomed to where my town is located. Want to check the weather elsewhere? Grab the map and move it around using the Wiimote. Zoom out and notice that it's a globe you're really looking at. Grab the globe, spin & rotate it to view other parts of the world, zoom in when you want to check out the weather in the location where you're currently looking.

Reading the news is a variation on the same theme, you start with the standard list and can then see how many articles are pertinent to specific cities using the globe view.

I'm thinking that in 10 to 15 years the Wii Children are going to be designing ways of finding & displaying information which will knock our socks off. Remember that years from now when you're looking to turn the oven on but find that you've just bought 700 glass Tom Jones figurines from some dude on eBay instead.