There's progress, and then there's real progress in this world

My grandmother lived to see Halley's Comet come twice.

She was 14 when it passed through the inner Solar System in April 1910 and 90 when it came back in February 1986.

That last time was the one time I saw it, the only time I will ever see it unless I live to the summer of 2061.

I was 36 years old and living in St. Louis the one time I saw it, and sadly, everything about the comet except the fact that I saw it has pretty well vanished from my memory.

My grandmother died in 1990 after seeing the world change from gaslight and horse-drawn carriages to spaceflight and computers. At first glance, the world seems to have changed massively since I was born in 1949, but I'm not really sure that's true.

In fact, there are time I think that most of the changes in my lifetime are simply about getting people to part with more and more of their money.

1948 television

Yes, our television sets have gotten bigger and bigger, with high definition, color and even 3-D, but all those things are just improvements on the first televisions, which were built and sold before I was born.

I may watch television on a 47-inch, high-definition set that seems almost perfect in the picture and sound it gives me, but I would be willing to bet that the folks watching the set pictured here watched with a far greater sense of wonder than I ever had.

I may drive an SUV with all sorts of modern conveniences, but except for the GPS system, just about everything else on the car was there in some more primitive form in cars people drove before I was born.

Early computers.

We have computers in our homes now, but there were computers people used before I was born. Ditto for most of the other marvelous things we have in our houses now. They're better, but they aren't new.

As for the computers, they certainly make it possible to do a lot of things we didn't before, but just as the original thought was that television would mean people could watch symphonies and plays at home, the Internet hasn't quite worked out the way we thought it would.

Whether it was chat rooms on America Online in the 1990s, porn sites, weird political stuff and e-mail attachments later, or Facebook in the new millennium, most people spend way more than half their time on the Internet just screwing around.

I've been trying to think of something that actually started during my lifetime and has actually made a difference to people, and the one thing I came up with was fax machines. Xerox patented the first commercialized version of the fax machine in 1964, although it was 15-20 years later that such machines were in widespread use.

I suppose manned space flight would be another, but of the billions of people on Earth, I'm pretty sure no more than a couple of hundred have actually flown in space. And I seriously doubt that any private citizen who isn't fabulously wealthy ever will in my lifetime.

So things don't really change all that much, and the progress we do make, we sort of take for granted. I can only imagine what it was like when my grandmother was a young woman and her family purchased a radio for use at home for the first time.

Or when the first televisions came available.

I can't think there is anything that would excite us that much. No television, no computer, no cellphone. In fact, it may be that the next thing that would truly excite us would be when reality finally catches up with Woody Allen.

This won't mean anything to you if you never saw "Sleeper," but I have to figure even the most jaded among us would be more than thrilled to come home one day and find out they were the proud owner of their very own Orgasmatron.