A Trip Back In Time

I had a pretty neat thought just now. What if I could go back in time and visit myself when I was eight years old? I would do some major showing off to impress my younger self.

I would definitely have to show eight-year-old Rebecca my iPhone. For all intents and purposes, let's just assume that, if I have technology that can send me back in time, I also have technology that allows me to connect to the phone service and WiFi of the future.

Because how impressed would someone from 2001 be with an iPhone 4S? The first version of the iPhone didn't even come out until 2007 (thank you, Wikipedia). I think the eight-year-old version of myself would freak out over the sheer awesomeness. In 2001, the cell phone was still a relatively new gadget in my house. I think my mom was still using her Nokia brick. If not, then my parents had upgraded to the not-much-more-impressive proto-flip phones. Only half of the phone flipped; it was the part that covered the number pad, and it was also the part you talked into.

But I really do think Mom was using the Nokia phone at that point. It was a box with some number keys and a sort of black-and-white screen (we didn't get cell phones with a color display until 2006). I think it had a game or two. That was the only part I would have been interested in, anyway.

It was a while ago, but I don't really remember being too excited about Mom's Nokia. I think that was mostly because cell phones were pretty much just portable telephones back in the day, and I didn't like talking to people on the phone (I still don't). I guess it was an improvement over the pager she had for work, though.

The main technology in my life was the PC that sat on a computer desk in our family's library/living room. If memory serves me right, we had three computers then: the desktop computer in the library, the desktop computer in my parents' bedroom, and the laptop in my dad's den. It would be another year or two (or three?) until the "community" computer got moved into the bedroom I shared with my sister.

Since my parents had their own computers to do their parent-y things on, the one in the living room/library was designated mostly for the computer games that my sister and I played. We played all kinds of computer games, although I don't remember ever actually using the Internet on that computer. The Internet was slowly growing on me (at some point between the ages of 5 and 9, my dad taught me how to use a search engine), but I think at that point I was still mostly concerned with playing computer games.

So imagine if eight-year-old Rebecca was just hanging around the house one day, deciding whether to play with Barbies or to go outside and play in the backyard, when all of a sudden almost-twenty-one-year-old Rebecca walks in and whips out an entire computer that is roughly the size of a chocolate bar.

I would be like a character from Star Trek or something! Compared to the desktop computer I was familiar with at the time, my iPhone would definitely seem like something out of a sci-fi movie. At that point in my life, I had seen a computer with a touch screen apparatus before, although I don't know how I managed that, because touch screens were not common AT ALL. The closest thing I would have seen to an iPhone would have been my mom's Palm Pilot or my dad's Jornada (totally forgot about those until this very second), and I didn't even care about those because they were boring.

So I guess that raises the question... If I wasn't interested in cell phones or personal data assistants when I was eight, would I care at all about an iPhone 4S?

My prediction: Yes.

Why?

The games.

Because cell phones today are more than just phones. They're, like, everything. And I think my younger self would be astounded by the fun things my iPhone has to offer. I think she would also consider my iPhone way cooler than my best friend's brother's Game Boy Color, because even an eight-year-old would be able to tell there's a huge difference between the graphics on a GBC and the graphics on my iPhone 4S.

Also, I think she'd find it super awesome that I can talk to my phone and it'll talk back.

So basically, I would be the coolest person she'd ever met.

Although she would probably wonder why the heck I haven't published a book and become a millionaire yet and what the heck I'm doing with my life.

I've Noticed Something Silly

I feel like I can't go anywhere on the Internet these days without running into 90's nostalgia. All the 90's kids tend to reminisce about the toys, clothing, movies, and TV shows from their childhood. While I enjoy rediscovering something that I had forgotten about from the first decade of my life, sometimes people get a little obnoxious in their nostalgia, and I'm pretty sure they irritate the heck out of all the non-90's people. I mean, yeah, we DID have way better TV shows than kids do today, but there's no need to be obnoxious about it, and sometimes it's okay to remember the 90's in our heads and not all over the Internet.

With that said, I will now reminisce on the 90's and early 2000's.

Once upon a time in the 90's, movies for home viewing came on a tape called a VHS. It was simple and straightforward- pop in the VHS, enjoy the Disney animated film of superior quality to anything produced today (isn't it a rule that 90's kids have to brag?), and when the movie's over, stop, rewind, eject. I was very good at following the "Be kind and rewind" rule.

One day, sometime very early in the new millennium, a strange new machine came to my house. It was called a DVD player. Along with the DVD player came a small disc that looked like a CD, except instead of music, it was a movie- Shrek. The DVD was so much more than the traditional exercise of play, stop, rewind, eject. You didn't have to rewind a DVD. When you put a DVD into the DVD player, a menu popped up on the screen and you could navigate among options with the arrow buttons on your remote control. You could skip to a specific scene in the movie, put subtitles at the bottom of the screen, watch the film in different languages, watch the film with director's commentary, watch a "The making of" documentary, and (the only one of these options that I really cared about at that age) play games.

The DVD was a game-changer. When you bought a DVD, you bought more than a movie. You bought various special features. You bought the portability of a movie that could be played on laptops. You bought a case that took up less room in your entertainment center. It was great! For a while you could buy movies on either VHS or DVD, but the companies slowly transitioned to only DVD and stayed that way.

That is, until they invented the Blu-Ray.

Nowadays we have option of buying new movies on DVD or Blu-Ray. We also have the option of buying old movies on DVD or Blu-Ray. A lot of the classic movies keep getting re-released on DVD, especially the animated Disney movies I grew up with. I'm not exactly eager to buy the DVD versions because I already own all of these movies-- just on VHS.

Only one problem: Since nobody makes VHS's anymore, nobody makes a way to play VHS's anymore. It's all fine and dandy that I still own all these tapes, but if I don't have a way to watch them, then they're not doing me any good.

I've often discussed this problem with my friends, and I've noticed something silly about the way these conversations tend to go. We've all gotten so used to DVD's and the machines used to play them, which are called DVD players. Therefore, it's not altogether surprising that we ask ourselves, "Where can you find a VHS player these days?" This is very silly, because the machine used to play a VHS is not called a VHS player. It is, in fact, a VCR.

Silly us.

Thinking about modern times and the future... I'm sticking with DVDs for now, since I own a TV with a built-in DVD player. However, if in the future I acquire a larger TV without DVD-playing apparatus included, I'm going to buy a Blu-Ray player. Unless there's something even better about to come out. Like a hologram movie player. Then I'll wait for that.

Note: Earlier in the post when I said the Disney animated films of the 90's were superior to anything produced today: I don't believe that's necessarily true in all cases. In my opinion, the animated features back then are superior to many movies created now (there's a reason they call it the Disney Renaissance), but I'm personally really impressed with the new form of animation that's been the norm for the past couple years. I'm nostalgic for the old days and 2-D masterpieces, but some of the movies that Disney and Dreamworks have been cranking out these past few years have been really entertaining and nice to look at.