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“The Good Old Days,” by Brendan, I Hate Linux, 31 March 2005, http://ihatelinux.blogspot.com/2005/03/good-old-days.html.

An eventful day today. In spite of a foul-up by USD, I got the Assistanship at UNL. So, failing a great counter-offer by my current employer, I’ll be there come August.

Brendan has a nostalgic and somewhat melancholy post about the past.

Not long ago I was talking with my friend Dan about the good old days of computing, the nostalgia with regards to different applications, the cost of new hardware, who was stuck on the worst pc for longer. Rather a sad topic for a couple of people in their mid 20′s.

One area that occurred to me was that of meeting new people.

Often these days, most people spend most of their online communication time with their friends and family, the IM and/or e-mail have in large part replaced the telephone enabling people to have multiple conversations simultaneously.

Go back a number of years, there were few on the internet, and even fewer who were capable of ‘chatting’ (ie having and using such an application). Back then, most who used such things did so on their own and didn’t know many people from the ‘real world’, so they ended up meeting lots of new people online.

Hopping onto IRC or some other chat service they’d spend time either with existing online friends from given social circles, or venture out and meet new people. Another common method was simply throwing ones ICQ # at the bottom of their webpage, e-mail, usenet posting or whatever was seen by others.

Heck, it was this way that I met my (now) ex. I was sitting in a Minneapolis chat room and someone entered saying they were from California, and me being the nosey person some accuse me of being, I IMed the person asking “You live in California and are in a Minnesota chat room… why?” And so began a nice conversation, like many over the years, but tapering off over the last few.

…

What’s the point of all of this? Just my thoughts on how much some things were ‘back in the day’ Back when ICQ was all of the rage, back when giving out your IP was not something to be feared, back when chat clients didn’t by default restrict messages from persons not on your ‘buddy list’.

Of course, a decade ago I was about crippled, so some things do improve. I remember being intensely happy while walking to Best Buy to purchase a computer with my family. In that same memory, I’m hobbling.

At one of the most influential periods of my life, all of my happy moments come from lying down. It was unfomfortable to sit, painful and exhausting to walk. I had accomplishments, but what stands out is how happy I was to fall asleep. I remembering being unable to walk a block to be at the White House fence. From the year before that I remember very little.

I remember that period of my life happily, and that comes from my loving family. I remember my first computer, a Packard Bell 100Hz with 16 megabytes of RAM and a 1.2 gig harddrive, fondly. I remember how mad I got at it, and how blissful playing Myst with my friend Aaron was. I remember getting (a virus-infected — egads!) copy of SimCity from him too.

My first computer had MS Paint, which I used to create (artistically terrible) alien land-scapes. My brother and I played Oregon Trail II, SimCity 2000, Hoover, and the Conquest of the New World battle-sim on it. I could forget my sickness and go anywhere and do anything. I’ve loved computers since. I wouldn’t have taken my undergrad degree from DSU without those experiences, nor my graduate degree from the University of South Dakota Computer Science Department.

Enough sentimental blogging for the day. And PS: I’ve had dinner with his ex. She’s hot. Cute and short and hot. Incredibly so. And so is her friend.