A weird thing happened last Tuesday. I turned 50.

Doing so feels weird mainly because I feel that at the age of 50, I should be more mature than I actually am. Sure, my body is getting weaker, but I can watch Disney cartoons and play old-school video games with the best of them.

What makes me really feel old is what I remember about how the world used to be.

The technology, for example. I have written a couple of posts in the past about the now-ancient technology that I remember. Like 5 ¼-inch floppy disks, one of which I was made to buy in high school for my Computer Applications class. We worked on Apple IIe computers—anyone remember them?—back in 1990, and I think they were out of date even then. In 1989, my high school obtained a lab full of IBM PS2 machines, which were considered top-of-the-line back then and on which I learned to type. That’s right—I did not learn to type on an actual typewriter. And for my typing class, I had to purchase a 3 ½-inch disk. How advanced!

These days, of course, I save my work to the cloud, like everyone else does. I do occasionally use USB drives, but even they are out of “fashion” now.

And I remember being in college in the early 1990s and hearing about this new deal called the internet (lowercased “i” according to The Chicago Manual of Style). At that time, I could not even grasp what it might be. I remember seeing internet addresses for the first time around 1995 or 1996 and wondering what the heck this “http://” thing was. I remember loading a web page on a computer in college and the page coming up S-L-O-W-L-Y and how impatient I got with it. I didn’t even really learn how to use the internet until I was in graduate school. However, I know that Google launched the same day I defended my master’s thesis, so I can honestly and proudly say that I passed school without Google.

However, it’s the music on the radio that makes me feel old the most. Not long ago, I was listening to a local classic rock station and heard Evanescence. “Evanescence, of all bands, is classic rock now?” I thought. Then I remembered that the song being played was, in fact, 20 years old. It was all over “new rock” radio when I was 30 and living in the Baltimore, Maryland area.

If you are 50 or over, what do you remember the most?