Lifetime in the Information Age = 7 years

The pace of technology advancement is almost unbelievable.  In the past 15 years the internet has grown from almost nothing into an indispensable part of life.  I can recall the BBS's that were prevalent in my youth which were text based bulletin board systems that you dialed in to with your 2400 baud modem.  Actually my first online experience was a graphical system way ahead of its time on the Commodore 128 (or 64) computer called Q-Link.  It's amazing to think of how far computer technology has come.  I also marvel at the fact that many of the younger engineers joining the workforce now have never experienced these older online forms and only know "the web".  It's been almost exactly 7 years since I switched to broadband internet service over the cable TV network.  I know this because when I cancelled my dial-up service account at CoreComm (ExecPC) 7 years ago, they offered me the option to keep just the email account for life for a one time fee.  Recently my lifetime email account was terminated.  Customer service wouldn't even acknowledge that such an arrangement existed and had no explanation for why it worked for 7 years!  When I first became a customer, the company was called Valley Business Equipment (VBE) and was local.  That company went through a couple of acquisitions over the years to eventually become part of CoreComm but my email account was still @vbe.com.  I'm guessing that the people who came up with this idea to sell lifetime email accounts at CoreComm are probably long since gone from the company, and the old accounts are just taking up space that the new management would rather just free up.  7 years sounds about right for the definition of a lifetime in the information age now.  If anyone else has similar experiences of how long a "lifetime" is in the information age, I'd love to hear about them.  Maybe in a few years I'll be writing again about how a lifetime is even shorter!