I recently bought a Dell Vostro laptop, which I'm very pleased with. A great bit of kit. While shopping around I was surprised to see the screen size and body casing of most laptops in high street shops, that is, a shiny body and a 15.6 inch widescreen screen.

The thing is, most people use laptops for web browsing, sending emails, uploading photos, creating documents, etc and the widescreen format just isn't the best for that. If you want to watch movies, then great, but I would think that would account for a fraction of the use of laptops. Also, why do the manufacturers insist in covering LCD displays with highly reflective 'enhancing' coatings and then surrounding them with shiny, eye-strain inducing, black plastic?

The movie character has a flash back. The flickering cine camera footage gives the impression of a distant memory from a time gone by. But it's a conceit, an anachronism. Our past is not a sepia tinged, dust marked, celluloid one. Our past is pixelated. Digitized. Converted to binary code by the corporations Fuji, Microsoft, Nokia, Apple, et al. A past of sub-megapixel cameras, low quality mobile phone pictures and blocky, jerky video. A compressed and 'web optimised' past.

The past of the movie flash back is our distant personal past and that of our parents. The age of analogue film with a few dozen exposures per roll and the wait for developing. A time when taking a photograph could be an event.

The future past will, most probably, be high definition and super-connected. A time of cheap, portable, Internet enabled multi-megapixel devices. Indeed, children growing up now will have the beginnings of this past. By the time their children grow up, ubiquitous life recorders may be a standard purchase from high street electronics shops. Everything recorded, uploaded, backed up. Constantly. When computing power and storage are, for all intents and purposes, limitless, there is no need to even think about which moments to capture. The default is 'record'. Children will gaze at iPhones in a museum and say "You mean you actually had to touch it, Grandad?".

When digitized memories from yesterday, a year ago, or a decade ago are all high definition and instantly accessible, there will be no dusty suitcases in the loft full of photographs of long forgotten distant relatives. No 'time out of mind'. A video of your Great Grandmother will be as easy to access and watch as a video of your trip to the theatre last night. History will no longer be interpreted through documents, photographs and memories. It will be streamed. Time will become a smaller place.