I can't wait to be a Grandpa. I'm planning ahead for it. I'm gonna be an absolute nut job in my elder years, and my lineage won't know what to believe when I talk. I plan on telling them that, when I was growing up:
- Cars didn't all come with sophisticated GPS systems standard. The ones that did exist didn't come along until I was in my twenties and you should have seen how primitive and expensive they were.
- Broadband" internet was 3-5 megabytes/second, if you were lucky and spent good money on it. Wireless was far from pervasive.
- There was no internet connection at all on airplanes. We had to pass the time by reading magazines about gossip and sports.
- We waited for a new installlment of our favorite TV shows to come out once a week, watched them on a dedicated machine used only for that and movies. I even had to sit through "commercials" every 10 minutes until I got "TiVo" when I was 23.
- We took notes in school with pencils and paper. Our classes didn't have websites. In elementary school, I had to do all my research in a library, filling 3"X5" notecards with facts from books I'd discovered using the Dewey Decimal System.
- To watch a movie we had to physically go to a rental store, where pre-recorded disks lined the walls.
- Hot Pockets were considered unhealthy.
- Transplants were in-patient procedures.
- Cell phone, iPod and computer batteries had to be recharged daily.
- Good computers came with 0.08 terrabytes of storage in them. 0.0005 terrabytes of RAM.
- Presidential elections were held with paper ballots that were largely unreliable.
- Reality TV was basically a new concept.
- Parents couldn't determine the gender of the babies.
- I saw Barry Bonds play in person... and he was considered a total jerk.
- Brown University had not yet lost its accreditation, and was actually considered a decent institute of higher learning.
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