It's probably a textbook case of priming, but after a Facebook exchange with pal Larry earlier this week, the "What is your real age?" (cough!) "quiz" (cough!) seemed to pop out of my time-line like baby Surinam sea toads hatching from their Mom's back.
Larry was taking exception to the fact that the cringe-worthy use of "literally" by people who really mean "figuratively" is receiving official recognition. Doubtless, the Romans seeing Alaric's Visigoths on the horizon felt much the same.
The English major who inhabits those corners of my soul still perfumed by old books and fresh ink is not unduly concerned. After all, this is the natural order of things. The person who lives where two languages blend smiles and agrees. The History major squawks, "Just be thankful you're statistically likely to live long enough to witness it!"
My inner I/T Geek just rolls her eyes and thinks, "Oh, honey, please."
I'm already feeling d'une certaine age as it is. Granted, I've thus far been spared the horror of hearing my all-time favourite tune from high-school re-booted by a dreckish pop-star/boy-band who won't be around long enough to be filked by Weird Al. But it's bad enough hearing covers of crap that should have stayed buried alongside the first Reagan Administration. (Ditto movies. I mean, seriously-and-for-realz-y'all, was Footloose not actually bad enough the first time around???)
But compared to measuring age by computer advances, that pales to #FFFFFF. Go back to the line in Apollo 13, where Tom Hanks' character talks of "computers that only take up one room." I was born when they were still multi-room. Gordon Moore had already made what must have seemed like pie-in-the-sky predictions about the computing capacity of the future, at least to the specialists in the know.
But advances miniaturisation meant that permanent storage (a.k.a. hard drives) had actually been removable for several years. What's more, you could actually own them instead of renting them from IBM, who needed a cargo plane to ship 5 megabytes to you a decade or so earlier.
My step-sisters had "Pong" in the late 70s, but it wasn't until the
(very) early 1980s when the middle school computer lab teacher humoured
me by actually letting me store my (admittedly) pathetic attempt at
re-creating "Space Invaders" onto cassette tape. Our TRS-80s and TRS-80
IIIs didn't actually have removable storage. For normal programming
assignments, you printed out your BASIC program and its output in 9-pin
dot-matrix on 15cm wide silvery paper (that picked up fingerprints like
nobody's business), stapled it to your flow-chart, and turned off the
computer (losing your program for good).
By high school, we had the mercy of Apple IIes and (360 KB) 5.25" floppy drives--i.e. no retyping programs from scratch if you screwed up. And 5.25" floppies it remained through college--CDs were what music came on...if you weren't still copying LPs onto cassette for your Walkman. I carried two of them in my backpack. One was the DOS boot disk, and the other the disk that held both my word processor (PC-Write) and my papers. Later, I schlepped three whole 5.25" floppies. That was after PC-Write freaked out and somehow sucked my Senior project into its Help section. (True story. The tech. in the University lab could only say, "Wow, I've never seen that happen before," and my BFF the MIS major quizzically enquired, "Didn't you have a backup?" and I looked at her like, "What's a backup?" And my boyfriend spent part of Spring Break helping me type it all back in. I married that guy--small wonder, hey?)
Nowadays, I still carry a backpack. It's green, not stressed denim.
It's slightly smaller, because I'm not toting tombstone-weight
textbooks. Yet it carries the equivalent of over 186,000 5.25" floppy
disks. (In case you're wondering, that thumb drive is actually a
step-sibling to the one that lives in my purse. So, yes, I have
actually learned my lessons about having a backup. Go, me. [eyeroll])
And that's not counting what's archived to cloud drives at speeds known
only to science fiction on the high school modems with their cradles for
telephone receivers. (Or, for that matter, even in the days when we
were using AOL CDs for coffee-coasters.)
So, despite being born into a time that made the first quarter or so of
my life oblivious to personal computing, that's now pretty much
impossible for folks in the developed world...much less the constant
churn it introduces into daily life. And, when you spend your workdays
mostly under the hood, setting your clock to the pace of hardware,
software, and networking evolution is a sure way to feel ancient in a
hot hurry. (And for cryin' in yer Sleeman's don't even think about
measuring time by the lifespans of technology companies.)
Fortunately, for anyone who considers I/T a craft or a calling, rather than a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle, it's a wellspring of endless possibility. Perhaps even a fountain of youth for those who opt to drink deeply enough.
