This past Saturday was, shall we say, a bit surreal. I spent the evening at my high school reunion hanging out with the same guys I’d hung out with in the third grade and hadn’t seen in decades, and talked with people about a memorable kindergarten teacher who a bunch of us had back before some of us could tie our own shoes. The evening left such an impression on me that I thought I ought to write up something about it, if I could possibly think of a tech angle that would fit in with Infoworld’s format. Then it all hit me: Technology that either hadn’t existed or hadn’t been widely circulated when we were all in high school was now in the forefront of the lives of probably everyone in the room. Some of us also are making a living in technology as well.First of all, I was contacted about the event via email several months ago, something not doable until the recent onslaught of computer-based communications. At the event, I exchanged business cards with a bunch of people who can contact me (and vice versa) via email. I can also log onto the high school’s Web site to find more alumni email addresses. A Web site? When I was in high school, a Web site was where spiders gathered in the woods behind the building. At one point, I asked a fellow alumnus if he’d put a memorable video he’d made in high school on the Internet somewhere. Although he hadn’t, I said that if he ever did, to send me email to let me know.One alumnus I spoke to now works at IBM. Another works in telecom. Although I had traveled from the San Francisco Bay Area to the reunion in New Jersey, I lost the award for Longest Distance Traveled to the event to a classmate who came in from Seattle. He works at – you guessed it – a little software venture known as Microsoft.While information technology sometimes can seem invasive and a real pain to deal with, it’s nice to witness firsthand how technology can, in addition to providing people with a nice income, bring people closer together and help re-establish long-lost contacts. Technology Industry