Recently when I was in Denver with Laura at a chemistry conference, we spent some time going through the trade show. This was an area where all kinds of business that worked with chemistry labs and professors set up displays to show off their latest and greatest equipment. It was amazing to see all these fancy "toys" students have today to work with. I did not have the courage to ask how much some of this equipment cost.

When I looked at all the equipment technology students have access to today, I thought about what I had when I was in a chemistry lab. It was 1977 when I graduated from the University of Minnesota. We thought it was pretty neat that we had a calculator that would add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was a big step up from a slide rule! The only computer was a mainframe in some big room at the University of Minnesota. Today the iPhone I have in my pocket is far more powerful than the mainframe computer was at the University of Minnesota in 1977!

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