When I was a kid, in the early 80’s, my parents told me they were born in the 1950’s. Wow, nineteen FIFTY-something! Man, I was shocked. The 50’s were the olden days!! That was so long ago. I felt sorry for my poor, feeble, old parents, born three whole decades prior.
Fast forward to now. I’m 25 years old. I don’t have any children - yet - but I hope to start a family in the next few years. Which means my children will be born in 2000-and-something. Ok. So in a few more years, let’s say around 2012, my kids are going to find out I was born in the 70’s, and they’re going to say
“Wow! NINETEEN seventy-something! That’s so long ago! That’s a whole other century ago! You must be so old”.
How are the children of the new millennium going to perceive our 19-whatever birthdates? We are going to be old in our children’s eyes so much sooner than our parents were in ours.
Then there are computers. In the 80’s, when I was in primary school, our school had A SINGLE computer. It was a Commodore 64, and it was on a little trolley, and each class in the school got to use it for one week in the year. I started secondary school in 1989, and that was the year they got rid of the Commodore 64 computer room and replaced it with a network of XT’s, with monochrome monitors. Finally, in about 1991, we got a room full of decent computers to learn Turbo Pascal on. We had a b&w hand-held scanner (only one in the whole school), dot matrix b&w printers, and we thought we were it and a bit.
My sisters-in-law are 12 and 14 years old. They attend the High School. When I call it the High School, they say “What?”, because it changed it’s name some years back and is now known as a Secondary College. The other day, one said to me “Did you like using the internet at school?”. I stopped and thought about the computers we used back in my day, and started to mentally grope around for a walking frame. Am I so very old? I had to tell her that the internet didn’t exist when I was at school, and in fact we didn’t even have computers when I started school. She was so very surprised. Of course she’s surprised, she lives in a world where VCR’s, remote controls, CD players and the Internet have always existed. I have a sinking feeling that technology is going to date me faster than it dated my parents, because it’s evolving quicker than ever before.
Man, this sucks!