[yason]

I just realized I'm mere ten years ahead of you and when I entered elementary school, it seemed like a whole century before the age of internet and browsers. Some friends had C64 for gaming and the bravest daredevil users learned how to write scrollers in 6510 assembly. This makes the baby boomers come from the Middle Ages in computer/internet time.

[robryan]

I recently found a book from primary school where I was writing about Netscape pretty much as if it was the Internet. I have a folder of screenshots from about 10 years ago where I am using IE 5.5 I think on 800*600 and a terrible looking MSN messenger. How quickly times change in Internet terms.

[RyanMcGreal]

This thread is starting to feel a bit like the Four Yorkshiremen, but it is fascinating to see how people's exposure to/experience of/feelings about the internet vary with even a few years' difference in age.

For my part, I was born in 1973 and got my first computer (a Compaq Deskpro Portable) when I was twelve. I taught myself to program GW-BASIC and later QBASIC, and then pretty much abandoned computers until about 1999, when I abruptly found myself making an internal website for my department in a large corporation. (I've been building web applications for a living ever since.)

I was aware of email and the internet during the 1990s but must confess that I didn't pay much attention. I certainly didn't buy the hype coming from enthusiasts about it heralding this epochal shift that was going to transform how we all live, work, play, socialize, organize and get civilly engaged (oops).

I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, and as a result, it fascinates me in a way that my teenage son can't really understand because it's just there for him in the same way that telephony was just there for me as a child (though I'm also old enough to remember rotary phones).

But my fascination with the internet goes beyond the fact that I watched it arrive: it fascinates me because it really is transformative in a way that other new technologies that arrived during my childhood were not. When I was growing up, our family got cable TV (remember the brown box "converter" with a line of buttons running from channel 2 to 23?), an Atari 2600 and a VCR. They were all nice consumer appliances, but none of them had anything like the transformative impact of ubiquitous internet connection.

Cable TV is already passé. When I'm consuming media rather than producing it, I prefer a la carte to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I canceled my cable ten years ago and never looked back. The internet is simply a better content delivery system than cable/satellite.

Video games are fun and entertaining, have risen technically and thematically to the level of an art form (on par with literature and film) and may yield some insights that can help us learn and stay motivated. However, the technology doesn't really drive a broader cultural shift. At most it has crowded out board games and is encroaching on TV watching as a more entertaining drop-in replacement. In any case, some of the most compelling video games owe their success as much to their online connectivity (over the internet, of course) as to their intrinsic gameplay.

VHS is not only obsolete in the particulars of the cassette technology, but in the more general sense that physical media are slow, cumbersome and wasteful compared to unlimited broadband access to digital content. The last dedicated physical media player connected to my TV was a DVD player. The next device I'm going to connect to my TV is an internet-connected media server. BluRay is simply a last-ditch effort to double-down on an already-archaic distribution system.