THE BIGGEST (AND BEST) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MILLENNIALS AND MY GENERATION:

A big part of what makes us the square peg in the round hole of named generations is our strange relationship with technology and the Internet. We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school.

If you can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into your weekly computer lab session and seeing a room full of Apple 2Es displaying the start screen of Oregon Trail, you’re a member of this nameless generation, my friend.

Heck, I can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into my afternoon math class at St. Mary’s and seeing a brand new Altair 8800 hooked up to a used teletypewriter and paper tape reader the math teacher (a chain-smoking buzz-cut coiffed retired Air Force captain) had assembled in 1975 or ’76 from a kit and kluged together. The used black and white TV and cassette recorder to load programs would arrive a few months later, and we would have weekly afternoon Computer Club meetings where we learned BASIC and other rudimentary computer skills. But just seeing the lights flashing on the Altair and the teletypewriter banging out program changes was the day The Future began to arrive.

And then, the future became part of the past. Which itself is even further in the past. The photo above, taken by a friend in May of 2001 of the rows of Altairs and similar Imsai 8080s in storage in the Quonset hut adjacent to the giant airship hanger at Moffitt Field that the Computer History Museum in Mountain View was working out of, before moving into their current location at a former office campus location of Silicon Graphics. It accompanied an article I wrote called “Raiders of the Lost Mainframes” that ran in the July issue of electronic hobbyist Nuts & Volts magazine. I reworked that piece into an article for National Review Online, which an early blogger named Glenn Reynolds linked to on September 2nd 2001, which I found while doing a Google vanity search on my name to see who was discussing my articles. Which became another moment when it was obvious the future of the Internet had now arrived — but that’s an entirely different story altogether.

But to get back to the Altair and the Apple 2E, did you have a similar transformative moment, either in school, or when you or your parents purchased your first personal computer? Let us know in the comments.