Reminiscing is a Sign of Aging, and I'm Dragging You Down with Me

(...with a truckload of links!)

We had an all-Indonesian lunch today. At one point we started talking about the science syllabus in Indonesia (getting more advanced nowadays than what we experienced in our high school days) and proceeded to reminisce about the early days we came into contact with computers (the 90s).

Oooh, nostalgic. =DDD

To think that back then we were happily using those flimsy 5.25-inch IBM floppy disks whose capacity I couldn't recall because file sizes weren't big enough to be a concern at that time. Nowadays we can hardly find a new PC with a 3.5in floppy drive, let alone those "A drive and B drive"...

Then there was Digger, the popular PC game of that time. (Even thinking about it now I can relive the panic at being chased around by those mice. (Oh yes I suck at action games even now.))

There was BASIC, our first programming language; mIRC, our first chatting experience (
*pops* asl pls
*types* m
*disappears*
). Before Winword and Excel there were WordStar and Lotus 123...

(Incidentally today too I just found this HCI comic about Lotus Notes from the same company.)

But even with these vivid recollections, our lives had (naturally) been so much more detached from computers that they are now, so we went on to appreciate Bobo, the hugely successful children magazine of our childhood. Probably because the memory was shaped during our most absorbent age, we could still recite the names of most recurring characters in that magazine. I have a very good impression about it in terms of being educational both intellectually and morally. I just had this similar reminiscence with my childhood hometown friend, and she said she would probably subscribe to it for her son after he'd grown a bit more. I hope it still maintains the same quality.

Randomly I was also reminded of Sanggar Cerita, the Indonesian version of audio stories that came in cassette tapes. I only owned one that was "Cinderella" by young Ira Maya Sopha (singing "Hari ini, hari ini, Ira ingin ceritera..."). To jog my memory I tried to sing the whole storyline in the shower (they had a summary song and a conclusion song and one at each main event), but I had blanks here and there. xD

There, there, enough reminiscing for now. ^^ I would call them "the good old days" but without undermining "the good nowadays" with all my present indulgences enabled by the technology leap, even if it means I'm constantly on watch for disk consumption while owning a total of nearly 750GB harddisk space...