This year's New Year's cleaning was quick: Pull out the file of Y2K clippings and dump all the doom and gloom in the trash with nary a backward glance. That got me digging through other files, and I spent a merry half hour reliving the Internet's infancy: the prospect of genuinely mobile computing (shades of i-Mode), the revolutionary notion of fixed access fees and -- gasp -- free PCs, warnings that businesses had to embrace e-commerce or die. With prodigious mental effort, I can even remember life before there was the Web, a veritable digital Precambrian era.

Memory is a curious commodity in the digital world. In one sense -- the physical sense -- it's just about free. There are gigabytes at our fingertips, yet a mere decade ago we were lopping two digits off dates to save precious space. At the same time, memory -- the ability to look back and assess the past -- is shrinking.

My file cleaning and the downward spiral in the cost of memory are a stark reminder of just how fast Internet time is. A dog year is the equivalent of seven human years, but that's slug time compared to Net speed.