Who would have thought 10 years ago that in the forefront of the next technology tsunami would be - the telephone.

K, I know today's phones are more than telephones. In fact, is there anything they can't do?

They can get you where you're going, show you movies and TV, hook you up with your e-mail, connect you with a searchable data base, amuse you with games, convert to a calculator, tell you what time it is everywhere, take messages for you.

They let you send text messages, write yourself notes, manage your calendar, read newspapers, magazines and books and store the phone numbers of everyone you know - just in case you ever wanted to actually use it as a telephone.

And that's just my phone, which I know is primitive.

The new iPad is basically a big phone, and as soon as they can figure out how to make it collapsible to the same size folded up as the phones we have now, the transition will be pretty much complete.

If you had told me a decade ago a phone would do all that, I - who can remember clunky dial phones and party lines - would have said you were nuts.

But such is progress.

Crazy as it sounds, 4,000 Britons survyed by Tesco Mobile named Apple's iPhone one of the top 10 inventions - ever.

It was Number 8, ahead of the flushing toilet and the combustion engine, in that order..

The rest of the list is 1) the wheel, 2) the airplane, 3) the light bulb, 4) the Internet, 5) PCs, 6) the telephone and 7) penicillin.

More than 42 million iPhones have been sold since they came out in 2007, and a new version may be unveiled at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

I don't have one, as I said. I'm kind of just limping along on the road to progress, waiting for that fold-up iPad.

And I can't wait to see what 2020 brings.

By the way…

If you look closely at last Sunday's Remember When photo on Page E4 that showed the 1977 fire at the Archway Hotel in Downtown Attleboro, that bearded guy standing in the street with a young girl is me and my daughter Lara.

A little feedback

"Your column on Auden got my attention," wrotes a reader about my April 4 column on living longer and death.

"I searched so hard to find the poet that wrote the eulogy in the movie '4 Weddings and a Funeral' and, yes, it was W.H. Auden. Did you see the movie?

"I have never heard a loss expressed so eloquently. I have since become a reader of poetry."

Yep, I saw the movie.

And here's an update from the reader who commented in my May 9 column on UMass rugby:

"The UMass rugby team got knocked out of the final four on the last play of the game which, interestingly enough, was such a close call each team thought the other had won," he writes.

"But the locals acquitted themselves admirably."

Thanks for the bears

Thanks to Siobhan Wilson of Attleboro for three teddy bears.

They go to Bears on Board, a program of the Attleboro Area Council for Children.

The bears - new, please - are given to police officers, firefighters and ambulance crews to give to children in crises.

Our teddy bear total to date is 5,597.

Thanks for the papers

Thanks to Sara Knight for a newspaper from London.

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE is publisher of The Sun Chronicle. Reach him at 508.236.0394 or at [email protected].