I grew up on the cusp of many things, technologically speaking.  I assume that the same could be said for any generation but I would submit that the discoveries of my youth were greater than those of my parents' youth, such as skim milk, and sneakers with ankle support. 

My seventh grade class, for example, had two computers that had the Internet, though only a few nerdy kids used it, and mostly they sent pen pal letters to kids in Germany.  In fact, computers weren’t really a big deal either.  A lady named Judy would come in to our class once in a while in third grade and show us how to make a green triangle named “Turtle” move around on a screen using only the keyboard, and one kid had a laptop which weighed approximately 38 pounds that he got permission to bring to school in 6^th grade because he was supposedly dyslexic but mostly because needed it to play flight simulator.

By the time I was in high school, email was fairly common but the students at my school took a while to grasp its ultimate value.  For most of my freshman year, people mainly used email to communicate with people who were sitting six feet behind them, ideally to send messages about certain girls’ reputation for promiscuity.  By sophomore year, we were able to use the Internet for more substantial feats such as attempting to download pictures of Cindy Crawford.  
 

During little league, one kid’s dad used a cell phone, which was pretty awesome because at the time, rappers were still talking about cell phones in their rap songs in the same breath as expensive cars.  I thought it was awesome, but I remember my mother and some other parents thinking it was “rude” and “ridiculous.”  My father was a very early cell phone user too, but he had a bag phone which his employer had given him, and which he kept jammed way under the seat, for use only in emergencies, such as the emergency when we had to call into WEEI while in Boston for a Celtics game and say that we were not supportive of the players’ union in the baseball stalemate, or the nightly emergency of having to call my mother to tell her he was on his way home, even though she already knew he was on his way home.

When I started college, computers were a very big deal, such a big deal that I recall one of the dads on one campus tour demanding to know if the college allowed students access to “data resources” through the network, which he regarded as very important.  After he made this statement he looked around at the rest of the parents with a very satisfied look but since nobody had ever heard of data resources, or a network, nobody said anything, and eventually my father asked if omelets would be available every day or just on weekends. 

At my school, students were allowed to use network resources, mostly to share music and pornography.  Napster was invented in the fall of my freshman year, which allowed the sharing of music among people who were not in the same place. This presented an opportunity for my roommate to stay up all night trying to download versions of songs he regarded as “sick” such as wordless piano songs played over constant base drum beats.  An offshoot of this craze was that Greg, the industrious geek on my floor, began burning CDs for residents for a mere five bucks, or approximately 14,000 percent profit.

Greg’s roommate was also a computer shark of sorts only instead of making obscene profits off of copyright theft; he parlayed his skills into expulsion from school.  As it turned out, sneaking into people’s computers and deleting papers, even if through a fake porn file which they voluntarily opened, was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be.

Near the end of my first year my Resident Assistant also fell victim to computer fraud of sorts when he bought web addresses relating to local universities and threatened to fill them with raunchy pictures unless certain large amounts of money were paid for their return. Incidentally, the president of our college did not hold blackmail of superior institutions is such esteem and he too was removed.

Today I’m just another member of Tech Generation but as I look on my childhood I’m glad to have lived during the transition.  Just imagine all of the trouble we’d have caused with access to data resources!