Yesterday I went to Austria to visit friends and family for a few days. I started going through some of my old stuff, throwing away some of it and scanning material that's still of interest. While doing so, I came across the invoice for the first computer I bought myself, just a little bit more than 10 years ago. It was a Pentium 90 with 32 MB RAM and a 1 GB hard drive. It had all kind of expensive components because I wanted to run NEXTSTEP (which only supported high-end hardware) and so the machine cost a fortune. In fact, for the price of the 17" screen alone you could get a powerful system these days. Coincidentally, I was just playing with my wifi AP/router the other day, a device with 32 MB RAM, 8 MB flash and a 200 MHz MIPS CPU that I got for under 50 bucks... However, this is not a rant about the speed of change in the computer industry. This is all well and good, and I definitely enjoy having a laptop with a gig of RAM.
Instead, it's more about observations of time. I still remember when 2001 was years away and we were all looking forward to it (you know, we'd finally have flying cars, thinking machines and all that stuff); I also remember celebrating the millennium. Now, when I see stuff from 2001, 2002 or even 2003, it feels old. But what really freaks me out is when I have to write down a date starting with 19... I actually have to check it twice to see whether I really got it right and I feel so retro adding stuff that old... time's a strange thing.