I take Japanese classes on Tuesday evenings.

On this particular Tuesday evening I heard something really sobering. Horrific, in fact.

I am one of only three people in the class who is old enough to remember cassette-based video games.

In fact, not only do I remember them, but, despite the longer, more sophisticated reign of the cartridge, I lost a great many years of my life to the flickering, squealing sounds of a ZX spectrum’s load-screen.

Having realised this, we started to deliberately reminisce about the other things that we knew would exclude the younger members of the class, and came up with the following list.

Some of the class didn’t just look befuddled by some of these; they flat-out refused to believe some of them existed:

– Minidiscs, (much more recent, but only teenagers would ever really buy them)
– Encarta 95
– Remote-controlled cars that were attached by a wire
– Calculator watches
– Those flat Donkey Kong games that were powered off a watch battery

– 5 1/4 floppy disk drives
– Atari cartridges
– The C64
– Going to WH Smiths to buy a ten pack of TDK90s

I’m 28. I may have grown a beard, (thus making myself my own evil twin from a parallel dimension), but I’m still too young to reminisce.

Never mind carbon dating. When they dig us up in 10,000 years the first thing they’ll do is check our pocket for some storage media.