Just You Wait

I turn 50 today. I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced these particular 50 years. I was born in 1976 — when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple, the year after Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. But I grew up largely without technology. To me, technology came in waves, and it was always exciting and new. I remember the Atari 2600, and later the Nintendo. The Commodore 64. The acoustic coupler in War Games. My first PC. The turbo button that made it fast (50 MHz). The sound of dial-up. I remember BBSes and MUDs. Archie, Gopher, Veronica, and the World Wide Web. I was there for all of it. 1994 was a big year for me. I graduated high school in the spring, and started college in the fall. Swamp Ophelia came out that year, and I’ve been an Indigo Girls fan ever since. (I just saw them on Tuesday.) It was a huge year for technology, too. Linux 1.0 was released, the World Wide Web went mainstream, and the W3C was founded. Netscape was released. Amazon was…