Growing old sucks

[Count Nerfedalot]

Two weeks ago, my three and a half year old grandson shocked me when he picked up my brand new two day old Droid Incredible and knew more about how to use it than I did.  His daddy had an iPhone for awhile so he knew all about swiping and zooming and such through the photo album. 

Now this weekend we were shocked when he saw one of those old-style desktop rotary dial telephones in an older cartoon and we had to explain what it was. 

And now he's switched from calling me Pawpaw which was just a cute and meaningless nickname to me, to Gran'pa, which makes me feel older than dirt. 

[Bzalthek]

Well, you can either embrace the fact that time doesn't actually stand still... or you can kill the kid and feed him to your family this November.  Your choice.

[Ghambit]

My 3 yr. old nephew kills people in CoD. He can also very nearly recreate every move in God of War, physically.  
Methinks he has superpowers.

But yah, you're old.       Fight it by staying on the cutting edge and never stop learning.

[Samwise]

Now this weekend we were shocked when he saw one of those old-style desktop rotary dial telephones in an older cartoon and we had to explain what it was. 

I don't think I've spoken on a rotary phone in more than 20 years.  I saw one at an antique store a while ago with my (college-age) sister and had to show her how the dial worked.

[Fordel]

It's not even possible to use those anymore, is it? Like, do the phone lines still accept the pulse method at all?

[Reg]

I'll have to look closely at my phone bill next time it comes. Doesn't Bell Canada still have that obnoxious 50 cent monthly charge for touch tone dialing?

[Selby]

I still used a rotary phone in California up until last year when I moved and got rid of the land line.  Pulse dialing is still around and they don't charge anything extra in the US that I know of.

[Zaljerem]

I have no problems with getting older. It sure beats the alternative!

[Count Nerfedalot]

I have no problems with getting older. It sure beats the alternative!

Yep! :)

And as for the advice to keep on learning, I'm a software engineer moving into database design and analysis so that's pretty much a necessity for continued employment!

[MahrinSkel]

It's not even possible to use those anymore, is it? Like, do the phone lines still accept the pulse method at all?

As far as I know, the exchange systems still support it.  I'd try the old trick of manually flashing the line to check, but I don't have a land line any more.

--Dave

[Sky]

In the house where I grew up, we still had a two-piece phone. My step-father had implanted the guts of a rotary phone into it, but you still had the ear piece and spoke into the horn. Meanwhile, I ran a BBS through my 1200 baud modem on my C64. Low tech meets (what was then) high tech!

We had also wired the house for distributed sound and video with changers and speakers in most rooms. I was so much geekier back then.

[Lantyssa]

In the house where I grew up, we still had a two-piece phone. My step-father had implanted the guts of a rotary phone into it, but you still had the ear piece and spoke into the horn. Meanwhile, I ran a BBS through my 1200 baud modem on my C64. Low tech meets (what was then) high tech!

We had one of those, too.  I could dial by flashing the line like Mahrin said, and I sometimes used it to talk with the grandparents when my parents were on the other lines.  I'd have used it more, but I needed to pull a chair up to it to reach the horn.

[Ard]

My parents are in the middle of nowhere Michigan, and still had a pulse dialing rotary phone up until like two years ago.  They only replaced it when they took my grandma in, because she's so old she couldn't see the numbers on it, much less dial it.

[naum]

I have a rotary phone in my home den.

Never resent growing older. Millions are denied the privilege. ~David Niven

[Soln]

I'm tired.  All the time.

[Fabricated]

I kinda get depressed when I remember that my very first computer and gaming system was a Commodore 64.

[Engels]

That's no cause for depression. We lived geek history. We're museum pieces, each and every one of us! Erm, wait.

[Arthur_Parker]

I kinda get depressed when I remember that my very first computer and gaming system was a Commodore 64.

I'm not surprised, the spectrum was much better.

[Sky]

I kinda get depressed when I remember that my very first computer and gaming system was a Commodore 64.

I get depressed when I think my first gaming system was a pong knock-off. The atari was ok, but getting my c64 was like putting on big-boy pants. I still remember working through Ultima 5 while the drummer sat in the next room playing that godawful mario game with the shit sound effects that made me want to stab and stab and stab and...erm, yeah.

I love the reaction I get from colleagues when I say I've been using computers since 1975. The newest Masters-level hire was born in 76, heh. In 75 I was using the mainframe at my grandfather's office to play colossal cave adventure and some star trek ascii graphic game, others I forget. But hey, had to navigate the file system. God, to think of the havoc I could've caused (dumping the entire buffer of one zork game to the print queue was bad enough). I was pretty obsessed with zork when I was a kid, only being able to play it once a month or so for a couple hours.

[ghost]

Holy shit Zork was addictive.  And Wizardry as well.

[Nebu]

In 75 I was using the mainframe at my grandfather's office to play colossal cave adventure and some star trek ascii graphic game, others I forget.

I loved that Star Trek game and played it on a teletype.  I still remember printing out loads of maps made of "x" and "." while nervously waiting for klingons.  I also loved me some Oregon Trail.  You can relate to being excited when CGA monitors started to be affordable. 

Getting older is a mixed bag for me.  I like how it has calmed me down.  I like that it has helped me be more objective.  What I hate is that my body can no longer do the things that it used to.  I play a lot of basketball with college students and the game I see in my head is no longer able to come out of my legs.  It's frustrating. 

[ghost]

 We used to play with this guy that was so blind that his glasses were as thick as the bottom of Coke bottles.  The dude didn't even play with his glasses and hit 80% of his shots.  Have faith Nebu.  Just think, you can eventually be that guy 

[Minvaren]

And Wizardry as well.

Tiltowait 4tehwin.

[Fabricated]

I kinda get depressed when I remember that my very first computer and gaming system was a Commodore 64.

I'm not surprised, the spectrum was much better.

A good family friend of ours had a Tandy I always used to play Sopwith on. I kinda miss that game.

[Chimpy]

We had an Atari computer (the 1984 olympics special edition with 48k of RAM!). Didn't get it until it was a few years old used. But that was our first computer.

In an odd twist of fate, a buddy of mine and his brother own a used record/game store downtown. I went there to help him fix their server one night before we went out drinking. On the wall is my old Atari computer in the box and the Letter Quality printer we had. I guess he picked it up off some guy cheap for a cool in store prop. Thing still has the pieces of brown packing tape my dad used to fix the broken corner of the box.

[Nebu]

We had an Atari computer (the 1984 olympics special edition with 48k of RAM!). Didn't get it until it was a few years old used. But that was our first computer.

I had an Atari 800, though it wasn't my first computer.  I have fond memories of all-nighters playing Star Raider.

[ghost]

My first "real computer" was a PC Jr.  What a steaming pile of shit that was. 

[apocrypha]

ZX81. With a 16k RAM-pack stuck in the back that you had to wedge in place with blu-tac or else the contacts would wobble when you typed on the membrane "keyboard" and it'd crash.

There have been so many major changes in my life over the last few years that I can't really separate out the effects of simple ageing. One obvious thing though is that I seem to heal more slowly. If I get a cut or a scrape it can takes weeks to fully heal, which never used to be the case. Plus I find myself deciding I've had enough to drink quite a lot earlier than I used to.

I think that the ageing process is strongly affected by whether or not you've had kids. I'm in my early 40s and almost all of my friends that in the same age group have children, while I don't. They all look 10 years older than me and my GF do.... 

[Soln]

friend had a Vic20, then a C64.  Then another mutual friend's dad had an AppleII then an AppleIIe, then a Lisa... that family even had a TRX80.  I also played on the university's DEC's, Adventure.... go left. no right.

[Trippy]

TRS-80

[Murgos]

We had an Atari 800XL and then a C64 later on followed by IBM PC with an 8088 cpu (and a Bernoulli drive!).  Kid across the streets family had a Coleco ADAM!    I remember the first computer in our neighborhood that I knew about was a TRS-80.  I used to ride my bike several blocks to go hang out at that kids house and we'd try and do BASIC programming.  Another friend ran the gamut of Apple boxes ending up with an Apple IIgs when I was in high school.

[Zaljerem]

My first "real computer" was a PC Jr.  What a steaming pile of shit that was. 

Definitely. But my first computer, the Tandy 1000 (in many ways a clone of the PCjr) was way way better.

Integrated 3 voice sound, 16 color ... pretty much remained its own standard for quite some time.

Still have a 1000 TX up and running at a whopping 8 mHz with a gigantic 40 MB hard drive. It plays Round 42, Sentinel Worlds 1, various Sierra games, and Pirates! like a champ. Good times.

[Tebonas]

My first computer was something called King Size that my father built together from a tutorial in a computer magazine. It had blocks the size of my fist as graphic (mind you, it was a tiny kid fist, but still) and was a wonder to behold.

My first real one was a Sinclair ZX81, the first one I used for anything but typing out game listings and playing games was the Atari 1040stfm (the one you could use tvs and monitors for)



It even had a hardware Macintosh emulator (Aladin) and a PC emulator (Beta System supercharger) , which was able to play games.

Yes, my father gave me a computer that cost more that 1000 dollars, a high class Grundig color monitor (which couldn't have been cheap either), and a hardware emulation that cost around 300 dollars (Mac) and around 350 dollars (PC).

What did I do? I bought Deja Vu (Mac) and Pool of Radiance (PC) and played those. Yes, almost 2000 dollars to play a game in glorious CGA.

I'm really lucky my father let me survive my childhood.

[Paelos]

My first computer was an Apple II that I used in school at age 7 to learn how to type. Mavis Beacon, biotch!

[Sky]

We had an Apple II that one of our accountants was using when I got hired here 10 years ago. I believe we retired it in 2002.