I Must Be Old

I must be old because I can distinctly remember experiencing a few technological firsts.

I remember getting the internet for the first time. My parents can correct me here, but it was somewhere around 1994. We got AOL. The kind that required some serious time to "dial-up" and you waited for the running yellow guy, to get to the second box with his yellow friends, and as you waited for the third AOL box your ears were tuned to the fax-machine garble that the computer spit out. We payed by the minute and my parents required us to keep a log of the amount of time that we were on it. Being young i didn't spend too much time on the internet, but as I got older and things got more advance I remember spending hours talking to friends through AIM. Constantly judging how "cool" I was by how many people I was talking to at one time.

When I was in middle school, my Dad got a cell phone. I'm sure you remember the first Motorola flip phone with a battery so big it made the whole device look like a turtle. I went to Viva Vienna (All you Vienna-ites know what I'm talkin' about) with friends and my Mom told me to take the phone in case of an emergency. The look on my friends faces when I took that phone out of my bag was priceless. "You have a cell phone?!?!" Every bone in my body wished that the phone was mine, but I felt pretty rad even if it was my Dad's. It wasn't until I was a senior in high school that I got my very own cellular device.

Facebook. I joined in December for 2004 due to Quinn and Allison telling me about this odd new website. When I joined you had a wall with your picture, the ability to send messages to one another, write a message on someone else's wall, and a box that kept track of what schools your friends went to. It was so archaic and simplistic back in the day, but at the time it was so advanced, so different. I can't believe what it has morphed into.

When I stop and think about it, I realize how fast this age of technology is spreading. I hasn't even been twenty years since I sat at our first black and white MacIntosh computer that was pretty much only useful to play a math game that involved shooting a guy out of a cannon. Now I'm sitting on my bed, using my personal computer to "journal" if you will and sharing it with a widespread public. It's mind-blowing.

Day 17: Technology.