"Since 1988"

This phrase is a tag line on a radio ad, obviously meant to convey a sense that the company is well-established, with a long history. That's why it grabs my attention.

"Since 1988" is said as if that were a long time ago. 1988 was just a few years....

pause while I do the math....

well, it's 17 years....17 years?!....already?!?.....damn, I'm old....

This happens a lot lately, as I realize how many things have changed, just in my lifetime. For example, when I was a kid, there were just 3 channels, and color TV was the hot new thing. Now we have satellite TV, with hundreds of channels, and still manage to complain that there's nothing on.

When I was a kid, my parents bought a 3 bedroom house for less than $25K. Now that's the price of a decent car. In the San Francisco Bay area where I live, you can't get a doghouse for that. On the other hand, my daughter proved last year that it is still possible to get a house for that kind of money -- if it's a fixer-upper in a small village in southern Illinois. Oh well, I prefer this climate.

My first computer had neither hard drive nor floppy disk. I stored my data on a cassette tape, and programmed the thing in BASIC. When I got a computer with a 40 Mb hard drive, I thought I'd never fill so much space. Now there are programs bigger than that. My daughter told me last week that she's running out of space on her hard drive - she's down to 15 Gb of free space!

When I was your age.....