I could point out a thousand reasons as to why I have suddenly started to feel old. Just the simple fact that I started this blog when I was 31 and I am now 38 is reason enough. Hell, blogging has gone from a fringe activity to the mainstream to now a relic of the ancient past over the seven years that I have been doing this. Technically I am supposed to just be tweeting this and posting tidbits on my wall or whatever it is that kids do today. But today I feel old and proud of it because we are celebrating the 30th birthday of the greatest machine ever developed: the Commodore 64.
This is the first computer that I ever had. I still have it, stored at my parent’s house and I am extremely confident that if I could figure out a way to hook it to a modern television set that I could get it to work. I can barely get a laptop to survive a year or two but the Commodore put in a good decade of service to myself and my brothers and taught me ninety percent of what I would end up knowing about computers. I learned how to program on a Commodore, I figured out how to do word processing and spreadsheets on the machine, and I figured out how to determine the best football team ever using Super Bowl Sunday (in which I took the 20 teams provided, created two 10 team leagues with each team playing ten games (9 in conference and 1 out of conference) culminating in an 8 team playoff, simulated every game, printed out the statistics for each game and computed season statistics for all 20 teams. I still remember the 1984 San Francisco 49ers losing to the 1981 Bengals in a playoff game with Dwight Clark being tackled on the one as time expired. Somewhere in my parent’s basement I still have stored all of the printouts. Yeah, I was an indoor child.)
What is incredible is that all of this was done on a machine that could only actively store 64 kB of data. Put it this way, the size of all of the text I have written for the blog this year is more than that. There is basically nothing that you can do with 64K of data yet the machine and a disk drive that was roughly the size of a beige Playstation with a fan that made it sound like an airplane engine I played more inventive games on this than I have on any other system since. And I truly would program my own games. I used to pick up computer magazines that had programs in the back that you could type up and enter into the system and play. That is how I learned the basics of programming by typing in code found in the back of magazines.
It is rather amazing to think that I have been around for nearly all of the personal computer revolution. I missed out on the whole homebrew era of the 70s what with my being an infant and all but for the last 30 years I have had iterations of every machine imaginable. I moved on from the Commodore to a Packard Bell in the days when they were referred to as IBM clones. I learned how to create boot disks because it was nearly impossible to run anything from Windows. I remember scoffing at the launch of Windows 95 because I couldn’t imagine having to run something outside of a DOS environment. I was on the web using Mosaic and at once point has both a CompuServe and an AOL account. I still use AOL email, which is rather depressing once you think about it. I’m at over 16 years on that email address. I am not as savvy as I used to be and I have kind of given up on my programming days but I really have seen computers grow in ways I never expected.
If I am feeling extremely grumpy I can talk about how kids today don’t understand how good they have it. That they will never understand what the world was like before everything was online and we were constantly connected. Except that I feel more sorry for them than anything else. Not only did they not get to enjoy the journey but they missed out on a simpler time. I know part of this is that time speeds up as you age but I really feel that time is much more scarce now than it was in the past. There is no such thing as free time. I’ve received six emails while writing this and a dozen posts have gone up to Facebook. I can contact anyone I need to instantly without worry that I would tie up a phone line or need to wait several days for them to get a letter. But that speed means you are always instantly accountable. There is no way to just sit back and relax.
I miss the days of just sitting at my Commodore 64 and enjoying the moment. Playing a game and not caring about anything else. Living a life where you are not constantly on call in a world where it is as though everyone is carrying a pager and must respond 24/7. There is something to be said for nostalgia. It reminds us to slow down.
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