The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick. The bites are so small and the process so laborious that dinner takes forever. Likewise, the bytes of machine code perform the tiniest and simplest of imaginable computing tasks—loading a number from memory into the processor, adding it to another, storing the result back to memory—so that it's difficult to imagine how they contribute to an entire meal.

As parents drift off to the sound some quaintly call typing, their children are deep inside multiple conversations with their “buddies,” pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth P.O.S. (parent over shoulder) and you might catch a few screen alter egos — for instance, shebiscuit, kickflip10, latteladie, talkinghead88, Jesusraves, each with individualized sign-on sounds, audio cues reminiscent of the way each character in “Peter and the Wolf” is represented by its own instrument.