When I was a small boy, we only got to see where our parents worked every two years. These were boring times; they generally stressed all the parents out because their offices were a mess and full of all sorts of things we weren’t supposed to know about.

But sometimes, I’d get to go to work with my father. I wasn’t supposed to.

Once, one of my father’s friends showed me a golf game he’d written for the computer they had. It was the first time I’d seen a monitor; I’d played Adventure before but you needed a printer for that, and the paper was this strange white and green stuff that you only ever saw boring stuff on. Sometimes you’d get long pieces of it to draw on and sometimes you got to make little worms out of the side pieces by folding them over and over.

So the monitor was exciting. There were two green dots on it, nothing else. The dots would appear at random. And my dad’s friend told me it was a game of golf – which, at my age, was about as uninteresting a game as I could feasibly imagine. However, it was on a computer, and it was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, so I was game.

The way you played “golf” was to tell the nice man where to hit one dot and how hard so that it merged with the other dot. This was how you “sank the putt”, another phrase that meant nothing to me. “Where” was a number from 0 to 359, and “how hard” was, apparently, supposed to be a number from 1 to 10.

I asked the nice man what happened if we hit it harder. He looked at me thoughtfully and said “I don’t know! Let’s see!” So I had him hit the ball at twenty – a large number, but conservative by my five-year-old imagination – and the dot became a line that bounced off the edges of the screen. I was ecstatic, despite the fact that I had not “sank the putt.”

The man was very nice – he let me try again. I asked him just how hard the “ball” could be “hit” and he said “let’s try a thousand.” And lo and behold – that dot became a line that rapidly and angularly turned the black monitor white. It made me feel incredibly powerful, little five-year-old me.

It took me many years to realize that I was hanging out in a classified area and using a mainframe designed for thermonuclear yield simulation to play golf. Wargames, as you might imagine, was an immediate favorite of mine upon its release.

So yes, young man. I’ve seen floppy discs. I have a synthesizer that still takes 3.5″, used to have a sampler that took quickdisks, loaded files into my Timex Sinclair 1000 using a boom box and cassettes, and eaten my cheerios off of crashed 10MB ceramic hard disk platters. So, I reckon, have many, many people here.

But also remember when it took a goddamn Cray YM-P to play “golf.” And then I contemplate the advances we’ve made so that I can now say “museum with the chimera of arezzo exhibit” into my phone and have it immediately give me directions, from anywhere I am, to the Getty Villa… and account for traffic.

And that’s “bonus points” for me. I can barely imagine what sorts of stories my kids will tell in this vein.

Via Reddit user kleinbl00.

It always fascinates me reading things like this, because it blows my mind to think of what sort of things I’ll be able to tell my kids in twenty years time. Hell, I’ve been using computers all my life. 15 years may not seem like much, but the archaic stuff I used to do still amazes me. There was a time when I installed Microsoft Office over a parallel cable onto an old Intel 486 machine. It only had a floppy drive. The install would take over three hours.

And I still remember setting up AOL for the very first time, probably when I was about 7. My parents finally caved, what with the spindle of AOL CDs now sitting on our desk. I actually know what Gopher is too, and used it extensively at the Ryerson Library in the late nineties when my mum went back for her Masters. I don’t think anyone actually misses it.

I’m one of the last to ever hold a floppy disk. I once used Zip drives. And the weird thing is, my kids won’t know what the hell I’m on  about.