A new kid on CoasterBuzz made the classic mistake of resurrecting a thread from around the time the site was launched, in 2000. My buddy Gonch pointed out that kids can now join the site who were born after the site launched, making us all slightly old. You see, because of the COPPA law, you can't collect information about a kid who is under 13. I realize it's technically not the most enforceable thing, but we do boot people who we learn are not old enough.
That also makes me realize that some of the kids on PointBuzz were born several years after launch. That site launched (as Guide to The Point) in 1998. That's nuts. I mean, when I was born, the commercial Internet was still around 20 years away. There are now kids visiting Web sites that existed before they were born.
Simon will never know a landline phone, let alone a rotary phone. He watches Sesame Street in high definition on a screen that's 55 inches diagonally and about one inch thick, not in black and white on a 10" CRT. His dad's car runs partially on electricity, and his first car may run entirely on electricity, not gas. He'll never think of the phone in his pocket as a "super computer" connected to all of the information in the world.
As a technologist, in the career and hobby sense, it's easy to forget just how fast all of this technology came to be.