A Trip Down (Random Access) Memory Lane, pt. 1

Per YouTube-sual, this post contains a not-to-be-missed video. Don't feed me, READ ME.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen's coin-operated.com brought this YouTube piece to Life 2.5's attention.


Yes, that new-fangled internet.

This got Life 2.5 thinking...and soon she was taking a magical trip down (random access) memory lane, thinking about her personal tech history.


And then she realized, it might be boring and narcissistic of her just to blab about herself, so she's interspersed some broad facts in here as well. Please share your own tech memories in the comments section. It will be fun! (note: exclamation point used ironically)

When I was young, real young (I'm 6-8 years old. It's the mid-80s) we had an Atari. I've no idea which model. It hooked up to the television. You could play games on it, but you could also type on it. My mother gave me this book called "computer programming for kids" or something. It allowed me to use programming language to make my Atari do anti-climatic things...like make a dog's head out of hyphens.

Not long after, I went to some kind of kid's tech summer camp at Cal State University Sacramento. I took a class in something in a program called Logo, which was a graphic design program which involved manipulating a white triangle called a "turtle" to move around a black screen drawing lines and arcs with simple geometric commands.


Wikipedia says:
Logo was created in 1967 at BBN, a Cambridge, Massachusetts research firm, by Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert[1]. Its intellectual roots are in artificial intelligence, mathematical logic and developmental psychology.

The idea is that a turtle with a pen strapped to it can be instructed to do simple things like move forward 100 spaces or turn around. From these building blocks you can build more complex shapes like squares, triangles, circles--using these to draw houses or sailboats.

Sometime circa 1994, we get an exciting Christmas present at the Eber house. A new phone line and AOL! Come to think of it, big family Christmas presents were often tech-oriented in the Eber house. Dot-matrix printers. Laser printers! Big boxes!

Wiki says: In February 1991 AOL for DOS was launched using a GeoWorks interface followed a year later by AOL for Windows. In October 1991, Quantum changed its name to America Online. These changes coincided with growth in pay-based BBS services, like Prodigy, CompuServe, and GEnie. AOL discontinued Q-Link and PC Link in the fall of 1994.

Oh my, don't even get Life 2.5 started on DOS. She likes to forget all parts of her tech life pre-Mac.

It's hard to recall just what we did with AOL in the beginning with its blazing dial up speed. I remember my mother wanting to use it to look up everything, the phone number for the pizza place for instance. This would frustrate me endlessly. Mother, just use a phone book. The Internet is not for such things.

As rambunctious high school freshman, my girlfriends and I took to AOL in lieu of prank calling on a wild Saturday night. We were probably the inspiration for that Hard Candy movie. We liked to go into chat rooms and harass dirty old men. Little did my parents know what had become of the Internet.

1998 -- I headed off to college and my ethernet equipped dorm room. Do you remember what a big deal it was to have an ethernet card and cable, and there was always someone stealing ethernet cables from classrooms. The Internet is suddenly fast man, real fast.

1999 -- For my introductory film production class, I had to learn PhotoShop. Our teaching assistant makes us all buy these fancy floppy discs called zip discs. They are smaller and less floppy. I think it's the first time I don't save to the desktop.

Zip Disks were introduced in 1994. At best, they could hold nearly as much as CD. They set you back about $25 in 1999.

Oh vey, Life 2.5 is getting tired. And this post is getting a bit long for the eye. So, let's take some inspiration from mediocre televisions shows like Grey's Anatomy and Studio 60, and just say To Be Continued...