Sometime in the 1986-1988 range my dad bought a computer for the family. A Tandy “286”. This was a big purchase for our family, likely several thousands of dollars. I was probably in third grade at the time.

My parents must have had a vague sense that this was a tool that their kids might need and use for school work and preparing for the future.

It came with a noisy dot matrix printer and had that computer paper where you had to tear off the hole-strips on each side of whatever printed off. The hardware had a chunky form factor, and everything was that 1980/90s beige colour that slowly yellows over time with sun exposure and use.

I used it a few times on school related things, but mainly I just used it to install old school video games. Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, Red Storm Rising, as well as just about anything I could get my hands on through the pre-internet floppy disk friends and family sharing network. My dad learned the computer ok, but really it was a tech suave uncle that helped me figure things out.

Every video game back then was actually two games in one. The actual game itself, and then the puzzle of commands and operations you had to work out to get it successfully installed on those old DOS based systems. Format, diskcopy, tediously changing directories with cd and precise typing, all that wonderfully archaic DOS language. Each game install was a puzzle of commands and voodoo that may or may not have ended up in a playable game. I got proficient at it though, mastering those skills built a foundation of understanding and comfort with troubleshooting computers. It also fostered a sense of satisfaction and wonder. Getting one of those floppy disk games to actually work and play on that old computer was tremendously satisfying.

That machine had a tiny amount of RAM. 640k. The computer I am typing on has 32 gigabytes of RAM. That is 64,000x more. The Tandy hard drive was only about 10-40 Megabytes. This computer 40 TB, that is actually one million times more storage. 1,000,000x!

I know this isn’t a new sentiment. Who hasn’t marveled at the advance of technology occasionally? But it just hit me harder this morning. I woke up, shuffled down to my fancy living room PC, and needed to move 9 TB of data from one hard drive to another. The data started moving at a rate of 300 Megabytes/second. Per second! And those aren’t even fast hard drives. The numbers are absurd considering what I used to work with as a kid.

So I just caught myself in a moment of small but profound wonder, on this quiet Sunday morning, looking around my house, wife still sleeping in the bedroom. What I’ve been through, learned, done, seen. Does that stuff in my fuzzy human memory really represent what life was like? Everything is so different now. AI, tech, computers better and sleeker than what we saw in Star Trek in our pockets at all times.

How can this be the same life? Am I really the same person as that 80s kid? What the fuck am I going to see in another 30 years? Bonkers. I hope I’m still sharp enough to be astonished.