Grandpa? What was it like to go from the Wright Brothers to a man on the moon?

The other night I went out to dinner with one of my oldest, dearest friends. "Oldest" in this case refers to the length of time I've known her and not her age. The occasion was the chance to get to know her new husband. We had met and spoken several times before but always at various family get togethers so the conversations were of the superficial, hit-and-run, glad-handing, nice to meet you variety. I figured that any guy that my friend would choose as a mate must have something going for him so I was anxious to find out.

The jumping off point to the evening's conversation was a recanting of when and where his new bride and I had met. We began to reel off the years, like the effect of dated pages flying off the face of a wall calendar. In turned out to be 23 years which, to a giant tortoise is walk in the park, but to us seemed half a lifetime ago (which in my case it literally is) and is also the same age a some of my underwear. But rather than dwell on the passing of time in incremental measures we notched the dateline with the passing of technology. Our friendship pre-dates DVDs and CDs. VCRs were the size of suitcases and the remotes were connected to the machine by a long cord. Who was going to win the format war? My money was on the Betamax.

For listening to music I had a Marantz SuperTuner reciever and matching dual cassette recorder. That's right... Two - in the same unit. And a JVC turntable for playing any of my 2000 vinyl albums. (Both 33 1/3 & 45s). Back then, file sharing was recording a cassette tape from an album. If you were good at it there wouldn't be a noticable gap between Side One and Side Two when you had to pause to turn the record over.

My first computer was an IMB pc jr. with a blazing 128KB of memory with a 5 1/4 " floppy disk drive, and that was still two years away. Modem? What's a modem? What's an Internet? And just where did we get our porn from back then? Oh that's right... We had to ask the guy at 7/11 for a magazine that he kept behind the counter. The hottest home console game was the Mattel Intellivision. I couldn't afford it but a few friends had one and we spent hours manipulating pixelated stick figures around the screen. They didn't look like it but they were supposed to be football players.

Forget about cell phones. Those were hard wired to your car if you were a heart surgeon or an L.A. power agent.

A lot of change in a tiny sliver of time. When my friend went off to college I would mail her letters to keep her up to date on what I was doing; or more correctly, what I had done the week before she received the letter. When she had time she would write back. If I really wanted to impress her I would type a letter. On a typewriter. It's like a computer, only the monitor is a sheet of paper. A month would pass in between.

Now, we just leave each other voice mail on one of the three phone numbers we each seem to have or more likely than not just send a quick e-mail. Instantly, and in a half a dozen ways, we can know that the other person is running 5 minutes late for dinner.

Her new husband smiled and nodded and contributed his own remembrances of technology long dead and seldom spoke of. We moved on to other subjects and observations. We laughed and congratulated ourselves on what wonderful people we had turned out to be. The check came and they picked up the tab. I said that I would get it the next time we got together.

Outside on the street we hugged and said our goodbyes and backed away waving; promising to do this again soon. I walked to my car reminding myself to check the calendar in my Palm Pilot when I got home and e-mail my friend regarding another good place we could meet for dinner. In case she's never been there I'll include a MapQuest link.