Apropos of a whimsical Friday evening, last week was New Student Week at NU, and by a set of weird circumstances I wound up having to help advise freshmen. The original colleague on duty had a conference to attend. His substitute suddently got called away to do a DARPA dog and pony show, leaving moi' to be part of the first impression 17 or so youngsters received from Northwestern.
No big deal other than this was a reminder that 20 years ago, I was a freshman at M.I.T. There's nothing like interacting with a bunch of folks who didn't even exist when you were a freshman in college to bring your mortality home.
To commemorate this savage reminder from above, I am now christening a new (the only?) regular feature of New Media Hack, "I'm So Old..." scheduled to appear on Fridays. In this week's edition:
- I'm so old I'm older than the World Wide Web
- I'm so old we used Zephyr for instant messaging.
- I'm so old USENET was where all the kewl kidz hung out, including Kibo!
- I'm so old I played games on a Commodore 64... And liked it!!
- I'm so old 8-track tape players were the iPods of middle school.
Misery loves company, that is all.