Some days, when nobody’s looking, don’t you sort of miss PINE?

As juniors in high school, we could send our foreign exchange students e-mail by typing up a document, saving it to a (floppy!) disk, and then giving the disks to our teacher who used somebody’s Compuserve account to send them all to the other school’s Compuserve account. At one point in the process, one or more pigeons may have been involved, or possibly majestic falcons.

As a freshman in college, I could only get an e-mail account with a note from my department declaring that it was for a necessary academic purpose. As a Russian major with pressing verb-related business abroad, this was an easy lie to tell.

Within a year, they were giving e-mail accounts out to every incoming student. Within two, they were giving out Netscape. Within three, they were giving out space on the servers for personal home pages. By the time I left, they were installing ISDN lines in every room on campus and building PCs into desks.

According to the rate of progress last time I checked eight years ago, I imagine the class that started college this month are riding their hover-sandals over to the Student Health Center for their cerebral implants as we speak.

It’s sort of amazing when you think about it. It was as if, during my college years, time travellers dropped the Future Bomb on us. I still think VCRs are f***ing amazing. (The show is just there waiting for you when you get home! They do it with magnets or something!)