Wednesday, June 09, 2010

A nostalgic tea towel for my generation

We were the kids who listened to
Together in Electric Dreams
And dreamed.

We copied pages and pages of code
and if we were lucky, got a BASIC ping pong game.
Our life's work was stored on a 32kb floppy disk
We waited, thrilled, around a dot matrix printer
and got our Ataris to speak to us.

Campaigns for gadgets and colour TVs took years
We accumulated boxes and boxes of videos, cassettes and defunct machinery
(that we can't bring ourselves to throw away)

We read about email in magazines,
but in our schools
internet access was barred.
We messed about with
wires and bits
of grey hardware.
And one day we heard the
screams and high notes
of a dial-up connection

And we waited.

And one day,
we were connected.

It makes me wonder:
What do the young
dream of
today?