This post is part of our February blog series. We asked several thought leaders to respond to this question: "What technology do you love most?" Stay tuned for more posts in this series, and for the upcoming March series on UX/design. This post is by Tom Anderson, President and CEO of Weymouth Design. Tom is interested in how advances in mobile and digital technology, like FFTs, can transform healthcare and interactive design. Find him on Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Nick, one of our video editors, was waiting for the server to compress and crunch his brilliant work into a viewable, transferable, and integrated file. Time was wasting. I had to remind him of the good old days in the late 70s and early 80s, when I was his age, and the long nights were spent lining up tapes and editing in a painful, laborious, and repetitive all-nighter fashion.