Having grown up in the '80s and '90s, I sometimes feel like a lumbering Civil War vet even though I'm just past 30. We had land lines, pagers, and we still had to go to the library to research things on microfilm. The notion that you could fire up your computer and get access to movies, music, news, and other people in the blink of an eye seemed as farfetched as it must have been to our parents in the '60s. (Remember the blazing speed of AOL dialup?)
Though I now understand my Nana's nostalgia for the "good old days" (hers for swing music, mine for early Pearl Jam), I am embracing all the cool new crap you can do that you couldn't do before. So here's a list of some of the more interesting things I've found to do online (and some off) that we couldn't have imagined back in 1996.
1. Cloud Gaming. Don't own a PS3 or any other cutting edge console? Thanks to Cloud Gaming services like Onlive you can use your high speed internet connection to play almost any video game the same way you'd stream a movie. For the love of God, how do they do this?
2. Retro Gaming. On the flip side of technology, you can get access to flash versions of almost every classic video game you can think of at Classic Game Arcade. We're talking about everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong to Sonic and more. And it's free!
3. Geocaching. Want to make a foray into the real world...kind of? Geocaching is a real-world treasure hunt, where players use GPS enabled units to find clues and other objects and interact online. I tried imagining something like this in 1999 but the technology didn't exist. Lots of fun, like hide-and-go-seek for adults!
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