23 year old here. A few years off, but this really resonates with me.

I remember crowding around our huge, beige boxish emachine computer with my dad and listening to the dial up tone connect us to the internet so we could talk to our extended family on yahoo chat - oftentimes right after dad yelled across the house to anyone who wasn’t in the room not to use the phone.

I remember sharing a handmedown box computer with my sisters, and we would fight over it late into the night (our parents let us keep it in the bedroom we shared) to play neopets.

I remember watching VHSs with my two sisters, and if you put in the tape and it wasn’t rewound, you’d bicker about who put it back in the case last time as it whirred in the player. I remember the library slogan, “be kind and rewind” being engrained into my skull. I remember peeking into the VCR slot to try and figure out how it worked.

I remember waking up to the whine of analog TVs - that told you that someone else was awake. I remember the massive static that went across the screen when you turned it off - my sisters and I would stick paper sheets to the screen just as soon as we turned it off and see whose would stay on the longest. Repeat. The noise annoyed my mom, so if we kept at it for too long she’d come in and tell us off for it.

I remember listening to my favorite songs on cassette tape. I adopted an old cassette player from my mom, it was portable and clipped to your belt. I thought I was the coolest person ever. When my favorite tape unraveled, I was devastated.

I remember the old corded phone that used to be in our kitchen, and how the cord was always - always - hopelessly curled in on itself. I remember we had a bunch of spare corded phones from previous lines and such. There was a really smooth, sleek black one that I swore I would take when I was older - “in college”. By the time I was in college, of course, I’d have a cell phone.

I remember my dad (a software engineer and general computer nerd) had a massive collection of floppy discs.

I remember the day my mom got her first cell phone. It had a flip down button cover, a green monochrome screen about as big as your thumbnail, and an antennae that you had to pull out every time to use it.

I remember when we got our satellite dish for tv installed. They had to install it twice because the first time, it turned out the neighbors’ very tall bush was in the way.

I remember when DVDs came out, and a lot of the time you had to store one movie on two discs. Same for video games and CDs.

I remember playing Oregon Trail and Amazon Trail with my sisters, all day long. Those games were the most enthralling, challenging video games ever for us. I was obsessed with finding the harpy eagle and the pink dolphin. Also catching the biggest fish.

I remember when my dad got his first flat screen computer monitor. I remember thinking that it looked so flimsy.

I was in middle school when Razr phones were all the rage. I didn’t have one - but I was never a cool kid.

As a young teen, I remember entertaining myself on the 10 hour drive to my grandparents’ house with my Sony Walkman and a massive case of CDs. When I was really little, and my parents were really desperate to placate three tiny kids on such a long ride, they’d bring our mini TV/VCR unit (not flatscreen, mind you) and wedge it in-between their chairs so the three of us smushed in the back could watch the Lion King and Alladin, using a chain of two headphone splitting wires connected to the one headphone jack.

I remember getting my first iPod - a huge deal in my fairly frugal family. It was a Christmas gift from my parents, and I flipped out when I opened the box and saw the apple logo. It was a refurbished blue iPod mini. Heavy, no color on the tiny screen. It was my most prized possession. I kept it in a clear case, and for about a year I displayed a movie ticket in the back, the very first midnight premier I’d ever been to - Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

I remember getting an iPod touch, and the fact that you could connect to wifi with something so small absolutely blew my mind.

I remember when the iPhone first came out, and everyone was soooo skeptical about it. I remember wondering how on earth you were supposed to talk on it without mashing the touch screen buttons accidentally with your face.

I remember getting an HD TV. The first thing I watched on it was a game of baseball. I was blown away by the fact that you could actually see the ball throughout the entire game.

Now of course, I have an iPhone and a MacBook, a Wacom intuos tablet, an iPad mini and a really old iPod touch that may or may not work. Wifi is standard, DSL is a thing of the past, and corded phones are practically dinosaurs. I have a data plan and unlimited text and use my cellphone for everything.

Yeah. It’s been a weird era to grow up in.