Even Flow..

I was 4 when I first touched a PC. It was an 8088 Zenith. I still remember the machine and from that moment, I was hooked. I loved playing games and writing some GW basic programs. During my childhood, I played with computers a lot, at first only games, but later I got more interested in operating systems and such. These were the days of BBS'es and I strolled around on many of them, downloading things, but mainly talking to people that were also logged in. I loved it. Later (I guess it was in '93), I got on the internet. In the meantime, I got my own PC with a 2400 baud modem and used to dial in to a free account I got from a friend. I got myself an email account and spent many hours on web based chat boxes. As a real geek I started looking at the building blocks of the internet and taught myself HTML. Somewhere in 1996 I installed Linux for the first time and it made a big impression. Since I was unfamiliar with unix like systems, it took me a while to grasp some concepts, but I managed and early '97 I completely switched from Windows 3.11 (my pc was too slow for 95) to Linux. While learning Linux I was on IRC a lot and next to email, this was my main way of digital communication. After that, things went fast. I started a web design company and later on started working as a Linux Consulant. The rest is history.
Now 15 years later, some ways of communication have been added to my list. I still use IRC on a daily basis, Email is something I can't live without and I use the following digital technologies to communicate with the outside world (some more often than others): this blog, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Hyves (dutch social network) and Linked-In. And of course my mobile phone with voice and SMS. 10 ways of communicating! (and most of them are accessible 24/7, everywhere) Of course there are people who use much more than me (pound, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc), but I still think that 10 channels is something that I couldn't have foreseen 15 years ago. I'm old enough to remember the time when we only had one phone in the house and wrote people letters or post cards and that you just went to a persons house when you wanted to check if he or she was at home.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had lived in the 50's or 60's at my current age. No generally available computers, no digital communication. Of course I wouldn't have known better, but I still wonder. My live revolves around digital stuff. Not only digital communication, but I make a living of it. A gardener or carpenter could have his job 60 or 50 years ago, but my profession and hobbies didn't exist then.
15 years ago I was excited about the Internet and I still am. I really think that I live in an awesome age where exciting stuff happens. The downside however is that I think that interpersonal relationships are more superficial than they would have been in the past. I have a couple of really good friends (yes, in real life) and a couple of 100 online, but most of them are merely acquaintances with whom I have conversations like "how are you? long time no see!". But for me, that's fine, as long as I have real friends to talk to, I'm happy.
What also comforts me is the fact that I'm not scared to grow old being lonely. I know that in 40 years (when I'm almost 70), I still can have the means to communicate with people all over the world. This is in contrast to my grandmother, who spent the last 10 years of here life in a home for the elderly. Apart form the weekly phone calls with some relatives, she could only communicate with the nurses and other people that were living there. Her world became very small. I hope (and think) that this will not happen to me. The other side of the globe is just 15 ms away and I would like to keep it that way.