22 years ago, dinosaurs (and my friends) roamed the earth

Seriously – 22 years is very long time... I recently hooked up with a close school friend whom I haven't seen in 22 years... a lifetime. By “close”, I mean that’s what we were then, but I haven’t seen her since. And while I feel like practically the same person, the world around me is pretty much a different planet. Country boundaries changed, some wars finished, new wars began, and technology changed a bit (!) and, well, my friend from 22 years ago turns out to still be a good friend :)

We looked at old pictures and new pictures of people we knew - people we know... and it really made it clear how much time has passed. I started to think of the things lost and the things gained in those years... so let's start two lists:

What we have today that we didn’t have 22 years ago:

• Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace.
  
• WikiPedia, Technorati, Techcrunch.
  
• Firefox, Safari, YouTube.
  
• The web.
  
• Laptops, iPods, flash drives, USB, 250gb hard drives the size of a British cucumber sandwich.
  
• Digital Cameras (?).
  
• Cell Phones (well... there was one I saw the size of a microwave oven).
  
• Windows Vista, XP, NT, 3.1, 2.0.
  
• Fear of Interns in the Whitehouse.
  
• Fear of Republicans in the Whitehouse.
  
• Azerbaijan and many other countries.
  
• This blog, any blog, the word “blog” (and so many other words!)
  
• Avaya, Agere, T-Mobile, Netflix
  
• Brittney, Paris, Lindsay.
  
• Virgin (Records or Atlantic)
  
• K-Fed, J-Lo.
  
• The criminal O.J. Simpson.
  
• Shoes off at the airport security gate.
  
• My kids.
  

What we had 22 years ago that we don’t have anymore:

• The Soviet Union.
  
• The big 8 accounting firms (Ernst & Whinney, Arthur Young, Arthur Anderson, Peat Marwick Mitchell, Price Waterhouse, Coopers & Lybrand, Delloite Haskins Sells, Touche Ross)
  
• Wang Laboratories, Typwriters (I'm assuming they're extinct)
  
• The artist Michael Jackson
  
• The ex-Football Player OJ Simpson... Nicole Brown, Ronald Goldman
  
• The artist known as Prince
  
• Phil Hartman, John Candy, John Belushi, Chris Farley
  
• Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Chemical Bank, ,
  
• Floppy drives
  
• DOS, Windows 1.0 (just barely)
  
• Almost 3,000 innocent people lost on September 11, 2001, including some friends.
  
• My Dad.
  

I could probably go on with this for a while..... but, I gotta get busy with the next 22 years...