Growing up you almost always form a certain stereotypical elderly figure in your mind… whether from TV or movies or whatever… whose sole job is to wait for the opportune moment to hold out a bony old finger and, with a dentured whistle, blurt out something like “I can remember back… when we didn’t have any of ‘dem new-fangled bread machineries… and Ma would holler out back to the dog to drag a sac o’wheat into the stove room… and we’s a be making dough…” You know how it goes.
Well, I’ve caught myself recently pulling these same shenanigans. Today, in particular, I started a sentence with “Back when we had to log into Unix workstations”… and I could have easily added something about not having new-fangled so-called wireless internet. Now, this really isn’t shameful, but I can’t help but wince at myself whenever I hear something like that coming out of my mouth. Lately I’ve taken to starting those sentences in the mimicked voice of the proverbial old man (the one with the weather-forecasting big toe) and in that way almost poking fun at myself before anyone gets the chance.
And why not reminisce about the good ‘ole days of computing? It’s not like I’m telling stories about punch cards (way before my time). The days of hunting around campus for a free workstation in one of my undergraduate institution’s multiple computer labs was a time of computing excitement. The so-called information superhighway was just starting to flourish and the rise of the first-person shooter had dawned. Them was good days! For fun we’d reset the servers of the freshman dorm workstations… great amusement for upperclassmen, and a belated explanation for the oft random crashes of those pesky freshmen terminals.
I could go on about learning to surf the “command-line” way using a UNIX window running in MIT’s X11R5. Or how about gopher? Or using the brand new Mosaic program to browse something called the world wide web? Ahhh… pure nostalgic geekness. 
Web designer and developer. Loud discerner. Software engineer and 
Man, you is gettin’ old … sonny. ‘member back in da day when tv’s only got 3 stations and you had to GET UP to change the channel! Lordy Lordy you must be almost 40!
Three stations!, I grew up with one watchable station (CBS), one filled with snow (NBC), and another nearly unwatchable (ABC). I spent a lot of time reading.
When I was a kid we got our first TV with a remote control. It was the size of a small paperback book, fairly heavy, and only had five buttons (volume, channel, and power). And the channel indicator was a plastic disc with number stencils that a light shown through… and the disc rotated to indicate different channels. Eventually the motor that rotated the disc (and that I think adjusted the internal analog tuning) wasn’t strong enough to rotate to another channel!
That’s funny.
When I got into this business, the docmentation was a booklet that would fit in a pocket. It took a forklift to move the computer.