Hello future historians.

I read today that there would be 45 billion people in the world by the year 2300.  I doubt it will be as straight forward as that, but I do think human beings will exist.  We'll probably all be cyborgs or neurally uploaded and living on solar energy instead of living in these clunky meat suits.   But we'll exist.

So you know we have this crazy newfangled (in historical terms) thing called the "internet", right?  And there's a lot of information out there now.  But most of it is still directed back and forth at each other.  Who is writing to you, though?  Well, I am at least.

I want to try to be to you what Samuel Pepys is to us.  So I write and this will get archived somewhere, and maybe you will dig it up sometime and read it or maybe it will just get lost, and that's okay too.  But for now, I imagine you reading this, or osmosing it or processing it or whatever it is you do in the future.

So let me introduce myself briefly.

I am Katherine Merle (Kaye) Mason.  I was born in Vancouver, BC to the most awesome mother in the world, Carol Ruth Frances Mason.  She seriously rocks.  I went to grad school in Calgary, AB, got my PhD in Computer Science, and then moved to California to work on video games.

I was born before the aforementioned crazy newfangled "internet" stuff.  In fact, when I was younger, the most complicated computer most people had was probably a pocket calculator.  Then it all exploded.  You're probably curious what it was like to live in a time computers or instantaneous communication.  And because I and my contemporaries have a foot in both worlds, we are uniquely positioned to explain this.  So I will try, as my gift to the future.

So, let us begin....