The other day, I was shopping on eBay for a new SD card. The one I have in my Galaxy S4 has a total capacity of 32 gigabytes, and I've got it down to its last 13 megabytes. The only thing it can hold much of now is Word documents. So I shopped on eBay and picked up a 64 gigabyte SD card for about thirty bucks.

On a per gigabyte basis, that's extremely cheap, and that got me to thinking about the technology I had in high school. Let's rewind about 6 years. I was a sophomore in high school (that's the 10th grade). Our school didn't have a lot of money so all our computers were outdated. Windows Vista was out there, but it was trash so there weren't many people who upgraded. So all our school computers ran Windows XP. In my typing class, you had to have your own flash drive. If you couldn't afford that, then you could go cheaper and buy a pack of floppy disks because they were going obsolete and nobody used them anymore, but our computers had floppy drives and a pack of like 10 of them cost only a few bucks.

I put some money together and bought a flash drive. It was a Lexar 512 MB flash drive. It cost me $15. Remember when I said a per gigabyte basis back up there? That flash drive cost me $30 per gigabyte. That SD card I just bought. 64 gigabytes for $30? On a per gigabyte basis, that SD card cost me 47 cents! Looking at that old flash drive, it's more expensive, on a per gigabyte basis, than most solid state drives these days. And it only held, like, 100 songs.

Everyone these days takes their technology for granted. They only consume. They don't take a moment to appreciate exactly how many years of research went into the development of their cell phones. You guys, these were things that trekkies were being beat up for when they would pretend these things would exist in the future. And now the same kind of people who would have beat up the trekkies anywhere from 15 to 40 years ago use the exact devices that they dreamt would exist some day in the future.

When you think about it, it's amazing to see how far we've come. I recently got into using records to listen to music from time to time. One side of a record will play about 20 minutes of music, and a 33 RPM record is bigger than a dinner plate. These days, we have SD cards no bigger than your pinkie nail that will store 1,140 hours of MP3 files. I did the math. It's 47½ days. You could play all that music from the top and never repeat a song for over 2½ months.

It's amazing to think that most laptops you bought at the store when I was a kid only held 40 gigabytes. Kids these days grow up with PS3 and XBOX 360. I grew up with an old school Nintendo. When I was a kid, I learned the art of blowing in a ROM cartridge to make it work right.

So before you take that amazing device you call your cell phone for granted, take a moment to appreciate exactly how far we've come. Because my first phone was a flip phone that didn't have an outside screen, so when you opened it to see who it was, you answered the call...yeah that was annoying. I can remember when every rich kid carried around one of those old school Moto RAZRs with the annoying "Hello Moto" ringtone! So yeah. Your cell phone is an amazing piece of human advancement. Don't take it for granted because one day when cell phones will outperform today's high-end desktops, you'll be feeling about the same way I (and most tech people my age and older) feel today.