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I am probably posting this because we are dropping off our son at Boston University this coming weekend to begin his freshman year–KSH.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I am probably posting this because we are dropping off our son at Boston University this coming weekend to begin his freshman year–KSH.
At age 72, I always find these things fascinating. Presumably college freshmen this fall were born in 1991 (give or take a year). Being sort of a bicycle nut living in Dallas, I note that 20-year-old Lance Armstrong won the U.S. amateur championship that year before turning professional in 1992 and win the World Championship and a stage of the Tour de France the following year. After a bout with cancer and winning the Tour 7 times in a row, he retired and returned this year to place 3rd in the Tour.
I was still using my TRS-80 Model 4, programming in C and using Fido-net (with a state of the art 4800 baud modem); PCs were the new technology; I had one with a whopping 1MB of memory on a huge memory card that you really couldn’t use, a monstrous 20MB hard drive and ran at a blazing 4 Mhz.). So were Mackintoshes. The Internet was for the government and universities. I was struggling to learn C++ and Windows programming. There were no C++ compilers, you ran a program to interpret C++ into C which you then compiled. Microsoft Windows cost less than $100–and you could actually install it on multiple computers, although you violated the license if you did. There were no schools where you could learn C++ or Windows programming (and no tools for the latter like Visual Studio); you had to teach yourself from books. Novell Netware was the big thing in computer networks. There was no Linux; although some of us were playing with Linus Torvalds’ Minux on which Linux is based.
Cell phones? Forget it. Radio Shack did try to sell me a car mobile phone. “Why?”, I asked. “Suppose you are on the road and your office is trying to reach you?” My answer, “Why do you think I’m on the road?” I do seem to recall that CBs (that’s “Citizen Band Radios” for the college freshmen) were a big thing. Vinyl LPs were disappearing from record stores; CDs were the big new thing. The new video technology was the Laser-Disk; for the freshman class, they were heavy 12″ disks, eventually to be replaced with DVDs. I’ve still got a LaserDisk player and the disks from that period.
For a trip down memory lane:
George H. W. Bush was still President; Governor Clinton announced that he would run for President. The Soviet Union collapsed. We watched Desert Storm live on CNN-TV.
Danny Thomas, George Gobel, Arthur Murray, Martha Grahmn, Rudolf Serkin, Claudio Arrau, Zino Francescatti, Dr. Seuss and Gene Roddenberry died.
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991]1991[/url]