When I Was Your Age...

Even at the unripe age of 21, it is amazing to look back and see how things have changed. Our generation is definitely the only one who can truly attest to the changes that have happened so quickly. For example, when we were younger (keep in mind this is less than a decade ago!) :

1. We didn't have cell phones. That's right, there was such a time. Beepers were the hot item. You knew who wanted to talk to you, now you just had to find a phone! Good times! Now anyone over the age of 7 caught without a cell phone is publicly humiliated.
   
   
2. We sometimes wrote essays, BY HAND! No spell check, no font change, no double spacing!
   
   
3. In order to do a report, we had to go to a library. Then we had to go and make love to the dewey decimal system.  It's a stupid system damnit and it doesn't even deserve to be capitalized here! There was no Wikipeda or Google with their tantalizingly easy search.
   
   
4. There was no Google! Holy shit, there WAS a time when people didn't use Google. You just... browsed the Internet. Oh and Yahoo! was indexed by real life humans.
   
   
5. No spam! No daily struggling with enlarging your penis, refinancing your home, losing weight, or Nigerian government honchos offering you money to help them transfer funds. It was a virgin Internet. That didn't last very long (slut!)
   
   
6. Full music videos on MTV. Araks reminded me of this one: We used to be privileged to seeing the entire music video during the stupid countdown shows. Now they just mention it. Use your imagination!
   
   
7. No text messaging. Oh yeah, you heard me! You wanted to tell someone something? You had to deal with the entire "Hey, how are you?" bullshit phone conversation.
   
   
8. No Paris Hilton in the media. Oh what a beautiful world it was. But that also meant no pink Sidekick, and who doesn't love that?
   
   
9. Our TVs were more thick than they were wide. A large TV meant half your living room was the TV tube.
   
   
10. No AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN. Think about all the people you chat with online every day. None of that was around. You had to call your friends one by one, ON A LAND LINE!
    
    
11. No MySpace. Unlike now where it is literally impossible not to be on MySpace or know someone who is on MySpace, there was a time when reading comments and being subjected to horrifically designed pages was of no concern.
    
    
12. Laptops. Simple concept, yet there was a time when we weren't able to carry around our digital life under our arms. You were lucky if you had a typewriter.
    
    
13. Here is something we DID have: Oregon Trail. Oh the amazing high-end graphics game that emerged you into a 2D Wild West adventure. Your heart starts beating out of your chest as the words "Your friend Bob just got bitten by a snake" scroll across the screen. Will Bob make it? You already know the answer to that...
    
    
14. DVDs. Flat round discs that can store gigs of data? Who needed that when we had rectangular plastic casings holding tape. Sure the video quality was shit and you would sometimes get tangled in the tape, but you didn't have to sit there and endure the guilt-inducing FBI warning.
    
    
15. TiVo. Back in the good old days, if you weren't there when the show was on, tough luck! Ask a friend (but you have to make sure he is home to pick up the gigantic land line phone)
    
    
16. Napster, BitTorrents, Aries, etc etc etc. We couldn't just watch any movie, listen to any song, and download any program at our discretion. First of all, we didn't even have the computers. And even after we had them, we had 56Kb. It would take hours to download a single song.
    
    
17. Starbucks. I can't believe we were able to live for so long in the dark ages. Thankfully, Starbucks arrived just in the nick of time to provide overpriced espresso for the whole world to enjoy... every single block... in every single city.
    
    
18. Credit cards. Sure they were around, but it's not like you could walk into any store and use it. Cash was king, and checks were there for the larger purchases. Now everyone, their mother, and their neighbor's dog has a Platinum Visa.
    
    
19. Video games. With Tetris being the apex of video game technology, playing football outside with your friends wasn't such a bad idea.
    
    
20. Blogs! In the heyday, you read the newspaper, watched the news on TV, and complained to the person sitting nearest to you. Now you can complaint to the whole world! Want to talk about your lunch? Write a blog entry! Want to talk about your opinion on the Middle East crisis? Just press "Publish." Want to write about how great things used to be and make a list of 20 top things that come to your mind at 2:30am? Well.. we saw how easy THAT was!