This weekend I finished reading John Markoff's excellent book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. If you haven't read it, do. It's brilliant. Perhaps I loved it so much because I grew up here in Palo Alto - you might say one of the foci of Silicon Valley - and all the references to Kepler's and SRI and Sand Hill Road were easily visualized. But what struck me again and again while reading was just how amazing and unlikely the journey was to our current, incredibly connected world. Leaps of mental metaphor, coincidences, small decisions, personal vendettas. From the decision to navigate by mouse to the metaphor of a desktop it just didn't have to turn out this way. But most importantly the idea that individuals could, should, and MUST use computers to advance their own intelligence, connect to others, and manage information has had stunning repurcussions.

When FORTUNE's David Kirkpatrick spoke to us on Friday (those of us in San Francisco participating via phone in the conversation in New York), he brought up the $100 laptop. The fact that this is even being considered is mind-blowing. As Kirkpatrick said, every government in the world is being forced to decide whether they want to participate and if not, they'll plan something else because every child must have a computer. It's accepted as a necessity now. Think how far we've come and how lucky we are.

In kindergarten, I learned how to type from an animated cat on a computer screen. By the time I got to sixth grade half my class was bored because the computer teacher spent too much time showing us where the floppy drive was and how it worked. Most of us had grown up playing games (from solitaire to Reader Rabbit) that came to us on floppy disks. That year we typed our essays. The next year we built Hypercard projects. In college, my key sources for my thesis were articles and books I discovered and sometimes read online. Half my thesis was about online communities! I can't fathom not being able to turn to the vast power of the Internet to answer my research questions. We're dependent on the technology, but connected and augmented by it too. I'll be keeping an eye on the next few generations to see their experiences around the world and watch how they surprise and surpass me. I can't wait.