Anything Goes For Now

Okay, so all you kids who actually sit through this, it will look embarrassingly archaic. But your parents and I all lived through this age.

It's kind of funny that this is nostalgia. When I was a kid, "nostalgia" was for the introduction of the Beatles and a country led by President Kennedy. You know, things that happened long before I was born.

But thinking back twenty years ago from now, we're looking at things that I still remember clearly: Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, the death of Kurt Cobain, and the whole O.J. Simpson debacle. And, of course, he dawn of the internet.

I remember being at Purdue (which, objectively speaking, is a very high-tech school) when email was first a thing. ("Electronic Mail", in case you were wondering...) I had to go to the Math Building on campus to submit a request for an email account. After three or four days, I had to go back to the Math Building, where I received my little card with my email address on it, along with my password. Of course, this was after standing in line for an hour, and probably missing a class in order to get it.  I was so excited when I got it.

Purdue had several computer labs, but I remember sitting in them and waiting and waiting for my address and password to go through, and then being able to check my email. Imagine sitting there for ten to fifteen minutes and then having no new email.

Of course, I'm telling you this in a day when your phones buzz any time you get a new email. This was years before Facebook (or its predecessor MySpace), Twitter, or (ugh) Instagram. This just goes to show that we've come a long time in twenty years.

It's crazy to think where we'll be twenty years from now.

I feel old, but wise.