Back in 1985, you would have spent big money to get an Intel 386 chip, with over 100 Megabytes of storage, and a local network that ran as fast as 1 megabits per second.

I know I didn't have one. The closest I saw to one that year was an entrepreneur 10 miles north of me who had a Digital Equipment PDP-8 minicomputer in his office.

Yet that is just what you see in the picture to the right:

• Over on the left is a keycharm given me by the folks at Intel in the late 1980s. Inside the plastic is a 386 chip. Turn it over and you see a 486. These were real chips, discards from production runs, which were given to the press to illustrate what Intel did at the time.
  
• That big round thing in the front-center of the picture is what we now call a stick memory device. This particular unit has 128 Megabytes of storage. Perfect for moving files, like this very picture, from a laptop to a desktop, or for bringing spreadsheets home to work on over the weekend.
  
• Over on the right, in the back, that little blue thing is a Bluetooth dongle. It ran this picture from my cellphone, where it was taken, over to my laptop at a 1 mbps speed.
  

We take this sort of stuff for granted. I do too, usually. The Bluetooth is the third such device I've had to buy in the last three weeks. I broke one and lost another. This time I searched for one that would stay on my keyring.

The point is, of course, that my keyring now contains most of a computer's components. My phone or my laptop acts as processor and user interface (the chips on the keychain are just for show). The storage and network are in daily use.

So 20 years ago, I could have written "in 2005, you'll be able to put megabit-speed networking and 100 megabyte storage on a keyring," and you wouldn't have believed me.

But such is the magic of Moore's Law.