Now this is
my kind of thread! ZU geezers unite!
Well, being 27 years of age (actually, 27 and a half--today is my half-birthday!
), I'm one of the oldest active users on these boards. And I inhabited a quite different world from the one most teenagers do. Just for the sake of reference, I was born in 1980, went through elementary school from 1986 to 1992, graduated high school in 1999, college in 2003, and grad school in 2006.
In my day, there were no webforums or message boards (at least none that I knew of). Heck, I got my first email address at the end of 11th grade, and it was a family email address--
and it was offline email! What is that, you ask? Simple, it was email without the internet. How is that possible, you ask? Good question! What we did back in those antique days was open up a program such as Juno, then click "Get Mail." Then our modem would dial up and then stay online long enough to download our emails, then log off with a DING!--and there were our emails, fresh and ready to be read. Back in a day when the only alternative was snail mail, this was revolutionary stuff to us!
Later, right after I graduated high school, my dad introduced me to the bold new phenomenon of instant messaging and chatrooms--oh my! It was even more immediate than email--actually talking to someone on a computer, in some cases people I didn't even know, and typing to them in immediate real-time. It was like talking on the phone except we were typing! Most kids nowadays are so used to this that they don't know what a novelty it was in my day.
Video game-wise, I was there for the advent of the ancient NES era. Of course, I never got around to playing my first Nintendo game until about 1989 or so (a good 3-4 years after it'd been released already). But my first, naturally, was Super Mario Bros. And it looked bewildering to my 8-year-old eyes! Funny story: Given the odd tileset that they used for the ground, I originally thought that most stages of Mario took place on a rooftop (the ground looks like roof shingles!) and that the pipes were green chimneys. So I grew up with Nintendo, got hooked on Mario 1, 2, and especially 3. I fell in love with Zelda, but Zelda II was more iffy with me. I really enjoyed renting Mega Man games too. I loved the Disney games too!
Then, around the time I started middle school, along came the
Super NES. And back then, it really was super! That thing was state-of-the-art back in those days, and I remember just how big a deal it was. Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, Donkey Kong Country, Mega Man X, Super Metroid--back then, Nintendo took all the franchises that we'd fallen in love with and absolutely exploded them with even more awesomeness! That's why, to this day, I maintain that the Super NES era was the greatest Nintendo era ever, even more so than the Wii today.
I was already grown up and in college by the time I first got my hands on a N64. I was originally impressed with Super Mario 64, but then along came Ocarina of Time, and it was the most orgasmic VG experience I've ever had in my life! It's funny how a lot of teens nowadays sometimes mistake OoT as the original and call it Zelda 1 by accident--because for me, OoT was far from the beginning but rather the culmination of the entire Zelda series. All the games afterward, by contrast, simply play second-fiddle in comparison.
*returns to the present age*
So that's how times were back in my day. Honestly, I didn't really think a whole lot about the future back in those days, so I guess I'm not at all answering the OP in quite the way she laid out!
But it's fun to go down memory lane and reminisce. And for all you youngin's out there, just wait! One day you'll be approaching 30 yourselves and you'll be thinking about just how antiquated things were in your day too, even though they seem so novel and innovative now!
"The Wii? Yeah, I remember when that first came out. Motion sensor remote controling was such a big deal back then!"
"ZU? Oh yeah, I've been at ZU for years. In fact, I was there before they even had social groups and friend requests!"
