Back in my millennium…

Okay, I’m not trying to sound like an old coot here, but I’m amazed at how much things have changed since I was a kid.

Take for example my current situation – as I write this, I’m sitting in the waiting room of my local car dealership using their wireless network while I wait for them to change the oil in my car. Five years ago, I would have been stuck watching Oprah or paging through two-year old copies of hunting and fishing magazines. But now I can do pretty much whatever I want on my computer, anytime, anywhere.

All this leads me to one inescapable conclusion – I am rapidly becoming an old person. To prove this, I need to just look at my son. It’s amazing how differently we view things already. Just look at these examples:

Computers

My dad was a pretty early entrant into the home computing field and he took me along with him. I had a computer of my own when I was in elementary school. It was an awesome Commodore 64, which gave way to even more awesome Commodore 128. Everything was on 5.25″ floppy disks and programmed in BASIC. Life was incredibly good.

My first PC clone had 120 MB of hard drive space. That was incredible in the early 1990s. Today in 2007, I’ve got a USB wristwatch with more than twice that amount of memory.

The Boy will never live in a time when he didn’t have immediate access to pretty much any kind of information he wanted. I remember when “online” meant dialing into a BBS with a crappy (and loud) 300-baud modem to share lame text adventures and ASCII art. Trying finding anyone today who knows what “baud” means.

Phones

The Boy is amazed by landline phones. He’s never had one in the house, because we both just use cell phones as our primary contacts. For him, seeing payphones and hearing the dialtone are like staring into a time machine.

I remember having clunky cell phones. My father had an actual brick phone when he was on call at work. I understand how to use everything on my cell phone, but it takes me about five hours to hammer out the simplest of text messages using my thumbs.

I remember rotary phones, the frustration of the busy signal before call waiting and what our phone number was three area codes ago. Hell, I even remember my great-grandparents having a party line. They shared the same phone line with a couple of the surrounding farms – one line, one number. Each house had a different ring and it was totally normal to pick up your phone and eavesdrop in on a conversation three houses away. Imagine having that kind of system today.

Other Crap

I remember when all of these things were new and exciting. Today they’re commonplace or already obsolete.

• Cable TV (and all the assorted channels that came with it)
• VHS, LaserDisc, DVDs
• Compact discs
• Pagers, both personal ones and the little coaster ones they use at restaurants
• Nintendo
• Air Jordans, Reebok Pumps, LA Gear, Hypercolor shirts
• Chicken McNuggets, Hot Pockets, Diet Coke

Perhaps the worst thing is, my kids will be able to point at the fact that not only was I born in the previous century, I was also born in a completely different millennium from them. This is an indignity parents have not had to suffer since the early 1000s.