Mike's Place

By Michael L. Craner

“Back in my day…”

Yeah, I’ve heard you old timers talk about how hard life was back in your day. How you drew your water from a well, grew your own vegetables, butchered your own beef and hogs, at the very least, you went to a butcher who did nothing but butcher….

Back in MY day, long before I was a webmaster, I was a “SysOp”. How many of you remember THAT title? SysOp today with my kids might as well be the same as a 33 LP or an 8 track. (Yeah, I remember those too, even if I WAS pretty young) I even remember how the book of matches helped the 8 track play right.

But what was a SysOp you ask?

SysOps were webmasters before the World Wide Web was what we know it is today. It was the independent “System Operator” of the BBS (Bulletin Board System) before we networked all the BBS’s together, making the public internet what it is today.

Sure, the Internet was born in the late 60’s, but back then it was just for the military and college elites. Certainly there wasn’t an internet ready computer in every home… shoot, most homes couldn’t house an internet ready computer those days, much less afford one.

Back in the day when a 300 baud (bits per second) modem was pretty common, and 1 GB of anything was absolutely unheard of, we had eMail, we had forums, we had downloads and uploads. I’m talking about way back in the 80’s when CD’s were new, LP’s were still popular but fading fast.

Back in those days, Asteroids, Pac Man, and Donkey Kong ruled the Arcades… (another lost social distraction.) Back in the day when those sorts of games started coming home. When names like Sega and Nintendo where just starting to enter the home from commercial venues.

Man can you even remember that far back?

I operated a site from a Commodore 64 (bits), (later an IBM XT) where you dialed a phone number that went straight into my home and into my bedroom if I wasn’t using the phone at the moment…or anyone else for that matter. You could leave me a message, you could even download games from my 1.44 MB floppy drive or 10 MB hard drive at up to 1200 Baud.

We got so excited when we could change the colors of our text or “chat” with visitors back then. Some software even let us set up a few variables that would let us leave messages in the forums that would look like they were addressed to the visitor or display the current date/time for them.

Back then, I realized a computer was nothing if it wasn’t connected. People are what make computing fun.

Modem Battleship was the ultimate “online game”, where you could play “Battleship” with someone over the phone line.

My parents nearly went insane I think, with me sitting on a computer all the time, tying up the phone lines, playing stupid games.

Today, we pay our bills online, check the weather, movie schedules, heck, we can even download movies now! We use the Internet to check the drug facts of our latest prescriptions, order refills, or shop online. LP has been replaced with MP3, 8Track is nothing more than an artifact, much like matchbooks.

We get our news online, we can play games online that are so rich in graphics and depth that they boggle the mind. You can actually get lost in a virtual reality now. We can get the same news feeds that our local channels get, if you even watch them anymore.

There are more websites in the world than there are people, and you can get to all of them for less than $50.00 a month in most area’s, and in many, you can get them at mind boggling speeds. I’m not just talking about colored text pages either, I’m talking about CD quality music, DVD quality video, “KodaChrome” quality pictures, and everything in between.

In the past 20 years, we’ve gone from dreams to reality to science fiction.

Who knows what the next 20 years will bring us?

Only our children know.

My generation brought Pong (a timeless favorite), Pole Position and Pac Man into your living room. As well as online banking, eBay, Amazon.Com, the Motoroloa Razr, and blogging, and so much more.

What are we doing to stimulate our kids to produce similar results for their future? Most learn keyboarding and MS Office applications in elementary school, which is great. But it’s the programmers and dreamers that make the future. Not the data entry proficient zombies being produced by our schools today.

Technology is making it so we don’t need travel agents, gas station attendants, and factory workers. We need dreamers now more than ever. We need to stimulate dreams, and encourage them. We don’t need to program our kids, we need to teach them to program.

When Jr wants a game, get it for him. If you can find the kind that allow for him or her to create custom scenarios, definitely get it. It’s the first step towards programming and allows them to exercise creativity.

Don’t let them ignore reality either. If they get off on skate board games, x games, or that sort of thing, find something local they can go and do the real thing. Video games are still not a replacement for reality…. Broken bones and all. Hey, life happens. Live it.

They shouldn’t live their teenage years in an office chair or on the couch playing games, but games do have an important role in their lives. Let ‘em play some.

But it’s still ok to make them walk a mile or two uphill in the snow, both ways, a few times too.