“Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.”

Seriously! Spacial operating systems? Awesome…

http://oblong.com/

So my birthday was last week. It was one of those birthdays that could have gone either way. You know “Hell yeah I’m young” or “Holy crap I’m getting old” (Fortunately I think I still have a couple years on this one). In any case it ended up being a completely disastrous adventure on which I had a blast! I was one of those weekends where you set out to do something and end up halfway across the state with a broken down car, pissed off waitresses, and a huge grin!

While I was on my great adventure I found myself with the strangest sensation, my iPhone wasn’t able to send out e-mails. Thus; leaving me quite disconnected from the rest of the world (Believe me not being able to hop on eSwarm every day is a challenge). At that moment it was like a tidal wave of memories from the endless progression of technology that has dominated my experience. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing against technology overload, I was pissed that my iPhone didn’t work. I love technology. Love it! Let’s just say, while my girlfriend keeps trying to get me to go camping, I keep suggesting a trip to downtown Tokyo!

Remember this little beauty. This was the exact model of the first computer I ever owned. Myself, not my folks, just me. Look at that keyboard, just waiting to be touched. For those that don’t recognize it, this is the original Apple II plus. This computer needed a disk just to start-up (and not one of those pussy zip drives, I’m talking those 5 ½ inch floppies that you could have used to play Frisbee with your dog). She was a beauty.

At the time, my mom had a step up from me: the Apple IIe:

Never touched the thing (wasn’t allowed to =P), but admiring it from afar was certainly a treat!

Looking back now, that ‘II plus’ was the shit! I could like, word process and play “Beyond Zork” (Awesome game btw).

A birthday or so later, my mom upgraded, this time I was allowed to touch it. I remember it was quite possibly the coolest thing I had ever seen, the glorious Apple IIgs:

That computer gave me a wonderful gift… it was the first time I ever played a video game… Guess which one?

Pacman? WRONG.

Kings Quest (which quite possibly was the original release of EverQuest… worth some research):

(Holy crap, while searching for this video I found that you can still download it, totally playing that tonight)
(Also see space quest)

I have to say though; it wasn’t until a couple years later that I found my true love…

The glorious Macintosh Classic II. (Again my Mom got jipped because she got the Macintosh Classic about a year before my Classic II… totally pwned). This computer rocked. It rocked so much I still miss it sometimes. Ironically, in High School I literally used a few of these as goal markers for an indoor hockey game.

About now I should probably start talking about the internet. Although I did go through a series of computers during the next couple years but the one I did most of my early internet usage on was the Mac IIsi:

Oh and in case you’re wondering, my folks did buy all theirs, but I got in good with the computer teacher at my schools, and went to both junior high and high school in Boulder County, which as you may know was a testing district for computers in education, so I got a lot of kick downs and ground scores…Except for the IIsi that was a gift from my parents)

Who remembers 2400 bps modems? Dude… I remember when my 14.4 kbps modem was the f’ing shit!

(The 28.8 kbps and 56.4 kbps looked pretty much exactly the same)

Now I know this post really isn’t point out any new information, or deep insights onto the cultural advancement of communications technology. Or giving really any detailed information about anything except my own meandering experience… it’s my birthday, whooooooo! If you’ve stuck around this far, you probably either know me, or want to. In either case, you rock!

Back before a visual internet was really popular, you would access various servers with a text based client. Telnet in particular. Now, we have all sorts of various programs to access servers, but Telnet was really one of the first. Man, at the time this was huge, I mean HUGE . Logging in to BBS’s, Online Games, Peer to Peer comunication (now called instant messaging).

So who remembers “Talk” … or even better “YTalk”? This had to be by far the coolest thing mankind had ever invented at the time. So you know how you have IM’s and Facebook chat, and Twitter… Well let me tell you, they all originate from Ytalk:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_%28software%29)

You could talk to your friends, in real time, all at once, online… wicked!

How about Gopher? Anyone remember that one. For me, it was like the original free version of Google books. You could search for any title (which they had hand typed in) and read it, right there on the screen…. Sweet!

I think for me though, the true revelation of the internet came when I first opened up Lynx. Imagine Internet Explorer with no images, color, or use of the mouse, and you have Lynx. Needless to say, this little gem of a program got me in a lot of trouble.

(This is what Wikipedia looks like on Lynx … courtesy of… Wikipedia!!!)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lynx-wikipedia.png)

When I finally laid my hands on “Mosaic” I was well into my adventures into web development. I had actually already made my first dollars online with an e-mail marketing campaign… Mosaic was AWESOME! If it still existed I would probably still use it (that’s a lie but we can pretend).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

After that it pretty much all becomes a blur of different computers, systems, programs, peripherals, and all those goodies. Now for my moment of inspiration: Next time you are sitting there updating your Facebook page. Watching the latest movie on your 10” laptop…that is still in theaters (cough cough…) or tweeting about how you just toasted a whole loaf of bread… remember this: I may not be that young, you may not be that old, but in our lives, we have seen a greater level of technological advancement than any 100 lives combined as little as 60 year ago… These days, working at eSwarm, being a part of something as groundbreaking as each of those progressions I have mentioned, I can’t help but look back at each of those steps and nostaglizing. (Yeah that’s right, I made that up, nostalgizing, awesome word btw)

I have to tell you, while I was sitting at a dilapidated gas station, with a broken down car, on my birthday adventure, playing monopoly on my iPhone, I was reminded of a quote that is by far from my favorite text ever written:

“This is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud!” – ++The Mentor++