You young folks, like change destiny, can't fully appreciate how technology has changed in the lifetimes of even us not-yet-old ones. F asked me once what computer games I liked when I was a little girl.
There were no computer games when I was a little girl.
Remember the scene in Apollo 13, where Tom Hanks waves his hand at a building and says it contains "the computer"? And the scene where people in the control room were doing calculations with slide rules? I was 9 years old then. When I started college, you could play Pac Man and Space Invaders in an arcade, and that was about it. Papers were typed on typewriters. Research was done in the library, with actual books. A notebook was a three-ring binder with paper in it. The Internet was a subject for science fiction.

So every now and then I hear a phrase, or run across one in my surfing, and it gives me a little jolt to think about what we would have made of it when I was a teenager.
- I went to Office Depot to buy a little wheel for my mouse.
- A worm shut down the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and the New York Times (this happened a few years ago, remember?)
- If you get email from the FBI, don't open it - it's a virus.
- The server has crashed. We might as well go home.
- I'm going to blog about this.