We all take it for granted by now. Boot up, buzz screech, click click, and here come Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, and the day’s e-mail from far and wide. And yet there was a time when it wasn’t there. For me that time ended in 1997. For most of you, maybe a little earlier. But everybody who is reading this 2003 issue of Asimov’s in the year 2003 was alive in the pre-Internet days. Most of you weren’t around when the first atomic bombs were exploded, or when the first jet-powered commercial airliners went into service; a lot of you had not yet reached this planet back when television made the big shift from black and white to color; for some of you, even the founding of this very magazine back in 1977 lies in some prenatal and well-nigh prehistoric era. But all of you stand with one foot on either side of the great dividing line that separates the world without the Internet from the world we live in today.

I do remember my friend Sidney Coleman, the Harvard physics professor, saying to me–was it in 1990?–1992?– "There’s a thing called the Internet; we use it to send physics papers back and forth, all around the world, instantly." It had something to do with computers being linked together across vast distances, he told me. I had a hard time visualizing how it worked. Eventually I discovered that use of this Internet thing wasn’t limited to members of the international fraternity of research physicists; anyone with the proper computer connections could make use of it too. Then I began hearing the phrase, "World Wide Web." I started noticing odd little lines in advertisements that began with "www" and ended with ".com." And in the fullness of time, even as you and you and you did, I had the phone company install modem jacks in my house and got myself a shiny new computer equipped with the capacity to hook into the telephone system and signed on with an Internet Service Provider, and–well, you know how it goes–

My father was born in 1901. Automobiles were still uncommon on the streets. The telephone was still a novelty. Even electric lights were rarities, at least in people’s own houses, though public buildings were being hooked up with them in his boyhood. Dirt roads, by and large, connected our towns and cities. The Wright Brothers’ first flight was two years away. Marconi was tinkering with the gizmo that would, years later, become the radio. The world into which my father was born was profoundly and fundamentally different in almost every detail from the one we inhabit today. He lived on into the 1970s, and over the decades he saw his world change beyond all recognition as automobiles, airplanes, radio, and eventually television arrived, along with ball-point pens, Polaroid cameras, videocassette recorders, push-button telephones, home computers, pocket calculators, credit cards, contact lenses, freeways, automatic-transmission cars, and a million other formerly science fictional things. Of course, these changes came gradually–the Wright Brothers’ first flight was not immediately followed by the construction of Kennedy Airport–and I wonder if he ever thought back to the gaslight era of his childhood and marveled at the transformations. I don’t know. Perhaps he sometimes told himself that he had lived on into the glittering science fiction future about which his son had been writing all those stories, perhaps not. But I never asked him, and now, of course, it is much too late.

And here am I, now in the seventh decade of my life. I haven’t seen quite as much change as my father did–we did, after all, have electric lights, paved highways, radios, and commercial air travel when I was a boy, hard as that may be for most of you to believe. There’s been plenty of change in my lifetime, of course, but most of it has been of a quantitative rather than qualitative kind. Radio and television simply didn’t exist at all when my father was young–they were concepts out of science fiction. (Even science fiction didn’t exist, really, except in the novels of H.G. Wells. Hugo Gernsback started publishing some in his Modern Electrics, the world’s first radio magazine, but that didn’t begin until 1908.) My father was born into a world where there was no way that information–voices and pictures–could be transmitted over great distances through the air, and then it could, a well-nigh miraculous innovation. What I experienced, and there’s a big difference here, were improvements in existing technology–the coming of FM transmission for radio, the replacement of blotchy black-and-white television sets with ones that provided pictures in plausible color. The same with air travel: the Boeing 777 is immensely more complex and powerful than the rickety thing the Wrights flew at Kitty Hawk, but it merely does the same task a great deal better. Before Kitty Hawk, the task couldn’t be done at all.

That’s the essential point here: some technological changes are just improvements, others are innately transformative. The dusty intercity highways of my father’s boyhood weren’t much different, conceptually, from the ones that Benjamin Franklin and George Washington used, or, for that matter, those of Greek and Roman times. Even the freeways that crisscross our nation today are just bigger and better versions of the roads of ancient times. Sure, the automobile, arriving early in the twentieth century, demanded paved roads, and the old dirt ones disappeared. So now I can and do drive from the San Francisco area to Los Angeles on a smooth, straight freeway in less than six hours, something that would have been unthinkable a century ago. Still, a road is a road is a road, and Interstate Five is merely a superior version of the dinky highways that linked the two halves of my state in President Hoover’s day, and those, in turn, were only fancier versions of the unpaved roads of an earlier era. The only aspect of an atomic bomb that’s different from earlier bombs (a significant one, I grant you) is the radioactivity; otherwise, it just provides a bigger and better bang. A push-button phone is easier to use than the old dial phones, but it’s still only a telephone. Et cetera, et cetera.

But now the Internet has come, bringing a qualitative change to society, and you and I were here to see it happen, even as my father was there to observe the debut of the radio, the airplane, and the family car. E-mail isn’t simply a quicker and cheaper way of making telephone calls or sending letters; it’s a whole revolution in communication. In pre-e-mail days we didn’t routinely send messages off to China, South Africa, Australia, and Spain of a morning, as I did just the other day, and have replies come back by nightfall–all without cost. (We might have written letters to those places, but we wouldn’t have had answers the same day, as I did in all four instances.) E-mail gives us virtually instantaneous contact with people all over the world, while imposing a form on those contacts that is quite different from earlier forms of communication. And the World Wide Web’s near-infinity of links opens all knowledge to us in a manner that the best of libraries never could do, while also turning the world into a gigantic marketplace where goods of all sorts are instantly purchasable with a handful of clicks. Even the good old garage sale has been replaced by the immensely different eBay way of turning unwanted possessions into cash.

And also, spam–viruses–e-books–passwords–Google–

Yes, Google–a revolution all in itself, cunning software that instantaneously and effectively provides the master key to all knowledge: you can remember a time when Google wasn’t there, can’t you? I can. How did we ever live without it? Oh, but we did.

It’s inevitable that we come to take miracles for granted, once they become part of daily life. Maybe there were days when my father looked back to the horse-and-buggy world of his childhood and felt as though he had somehow dropped through a fault in time, but I tend to doubt it. He adapted to the changes–most of them, anyway–as they came along, and after a time it must have seemed to him that things had always been that way. Just like everyone else, he had a radio, a telephone, a television set, an alarm clock, none of which existed when he was young. He spent the last twenty years of his life traveling far and wide on jet airliners. He would have had a car if he had had any need for one, but he lived in a city where owning one was more of a nuisance than a necessity. (Oddly, although he was an accountant, he never bothered to get a pocket calculator, and he died before the age of home computers.) Once in a while, maybe, he might have looked back at the vanished pre-technological world into which he had been born and felt a little shiver of disorientation, but he was too much of a down-to-earth man to have dwelled very often on the immensity of the changes he had seen.

And we’ll be the same way. Which is, I think, a mistake. Far better, I think, for us who love to read stories about the fantastic future to wake up each day acknowledging that we have seen a big piece of that fantastic future come to life in our very own lives. We in particular need to keep bright in ourselves a sense of perspective on the relationship of the past and the future–that cosmic view of things that enabled Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon to reshape the political structure of an entire galaxy in his famous "Foundation" epic. I believe it’s important to maintain an awareness of the power and wondrousness of change, for those who fail to understand the meaning of change will be devoured by it; and for us there is no better way to acknowledge that power and that wondrousness than to remember that we, the generation of those who were alive and aware in the late 1990s, have lived through a very special change, a colossal transformation of our civilization.

What I’m doing here is "timebinding"–a term invented by Alfred Korzybski, the great semanticist of the last century, to describe what he saw as the distinguishing characteristic of Homo sapiens, the ability to establish continuity beyond the individual life span by keeping permanent records and transmitting them, preferably in written form, to later generations. I set these words down now to remind you of the transition society has just undergone, and to remind you of the magnitude of the change. Our civilization was altered forever by a spectacular technological innovation in our very own lifetimes, and it behooves us to be aware of that, to understand that we have passed through a transformation such as rarely comes in human history, and to contemplate the differences that that transformation has worked on the world into which we were born.

We who are now adults are the only ones who will be fully aware of what the Internet has wrought. Those who come after us will, and rightly so, take it all for granted. What, I wonder, will you say to your grandchildren, when you tell them that you grew up in the days before e-mail, and they look at you in disbelief?