Pipe n’ slippers

I am getting old.

Apparently teenagers are shunning email for instant messages. I still have trouble with email. I remember when email was something reserved for people who were doing computer science at university. I remember getting my first dial-up at home. I remember the excitement of sending and receiving emails. Back in those days if you got a couple of email messages a week, it was a busy week. But you could guarantee that every email message you got was a real message, as opposed to spam. These days I get thousands of emails a week, but still only a couple I want to read.

I remember my first mobile phone too. Again, back when very few people had them. They were brick sized and weighed about the same as a bag full of toffee-apples. SMSs didn’t even exist at the start, but shortly they were introduced. It cost 12p per message. Now I get 500 a month free of which I use about 30. Seems every kid you see has a mobile their hand and is busy sending texts. Statistics seem to back this up with over 25 billion SMSs sent in the UK last year. That’s over 400 for every person alive in the UK.

Technology confuses me. I remember when HTML was in its infancy and web pages were made up of gaudy colours, flashing text and animated gifs. Web Programming meant emailing a form from a web page. I remember the mysterious world of cgi and perl scripts. I remember when php came out and web programming took a leap forward. Now there seem to be more frameworks than cars on the road. Ruby on rails? I seem to remember ruby being about in the old days … I don’t remember no rails. I used to laugh at my parents lack of understanding of email and the internet. Now I am the one being laughed at by kids when I ask what AJAX is, how I grind a Java bean or where I plug in my bluetooth device. And what the hell is scaffolding?

I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out (1992 that was). And then was amazed when Doom appeared on the scene. Amazing 3D graphics produced in real time. It was amazing a computer could do this AND it was multiplayer … many an hour was spent playing that in the labs at school. Computers graphics also appeared in films. None of your fancy Pixar stuff, but things like Tron were enough to amaze me. Star Wars (the original ones) were something special.

I used to spend hours in a pub, then could stagger to a club, get a few hours sleep and get up for Uni the next day. Now I’d rather have a few drinks in the pub and go home and have a cup of tea.

Sometimes I long for the good old days. Sometimes I just feel old.

Where’s my pipe and slippers?

Moo