45

I turned 45. Not very exciting.  I confused Eryn for a moment when I told her I was halfway to 50.  She and my wife got me a very neat business card holder for my birthday with a Marvin the Martian top. I'm not sure I needed a container for business cards, but if I had to have one, that one is pretty neat.

Yesterday, while digging around on the book shelf, I pulled out my old copy of Retha Warnicke's The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn. I met Retha back then when I was taking classes from Stanford Lehmberg (if anything makes me feel old, Stan dying last year does - I had some wonderful years learning history from him), and she was fun to talk to - some very interesting ideas and I think not being a crusty old prof who believed in history being a particular way and no other, but a young guy who actually seemed open to new ideas probably rubbed her the right way.

 

But the amusing part of picking up the book yesterday is that when I opened it, I found my wife's birthday card to me on my 24th birthday.  This year, instead of an "I love you" I got a card about a panda who stuck my cake up his butt and my daughter signed it to the "old man".  Times change.

Some Hardware History

We were having a discussion during pre-standup about being old.  Obviously, this wasn't a typical discussion, because developers, on average, tend to be somewhat younger.  However, in this particular group, there are some folks in their forties.

After chatting for a few moments, one of the guys said, "You know how you can tell when someone is young? When you mention working on a 386 and they don't remember those having existed."  I didn't bother to mention that if I had been using that example, it would have been prior to a 386. But he's right.  It's like the we won't sell alcohol to you sign where the increase in now indicates when you were born.  Where you might have used an 086 in that example at one point, it's had to slide up to an 80386 to account for the fact that people are getting younger and younger and 1985 represents well before the birthdate and computer literacy date of some of the developers.  Not even the youngest!  You're almost 30 if you born in 1985.  Soon it'll move to an 80486 as those were introduced in 1989.

I countered that at least none of them could claim they hadn't used a 14.4 baud modem and one of the youngest made a sound that was dubious at best.  So I told him that if he'd used our internal printer/fax machines (which are gloriously SLOW) he was using a 14.4, and he could validate it himself.  Here's the proof.