Ralph Koster lists the reasons my year of birth, 1971, is
the perfect geek age. Some of the ones I can confirm:
- It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
Yep. But I'd argue that's about the age you should
stop obsessing on
Star Wars. I remember when
Independence Day came out, and my nieces and nephews thought it was the greatest thing ever, I'd be all "please, you need to see
Star Wars before you say that." Then I watched it as an adult and was amazed at how bad it was.
- I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
I did not have a "computer" (just the Atari VCS nee 2600) until I got a Commodore 64, but I do remember how the Commodore 64 magazines would have pages of code you could type to program your own game. And I remember how a mistyped line would make all that work useless.
- I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
Yeah, but I wasn't into them near as much as third tier comics like
Power Man & Iron Fist and
Moon Knight.
- I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
Our big project in computer class was to create an image of a dog, and then to, get this, have the dog
wag it's tail. l337!
- I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
Are you saying the Macs in grade school were
not useful? How the hell else was I supposed to play
Oregon Trail?
- And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
Well, I gotta say, I prefer the "new" way. I have no fond memories of card catalogs.
Looking at Ralph's list, I definitely wasn't as geeky as I could have been. Yeah, I loved arcade's (Video Giz Wiz! Willie O's!), but I avoided D&D, graphic novels, most science fiction (except for
Star Galatica - don't ask), and hardcore computing.
[
boingboing]
No comments:
Post a Comment