The other day I was chatting with a colleague, and along the line we lurched into a conversation about arcade video games, reminiscing about our youthful days, wasted among the laminated cabinets of yore, scapegraces staring glassily into the glabrous, glowing cathode ray tubes, armed with nothing more than a pocketful of quarters and a belly full of Jolt.

It was during this worldly discourse that we fell into oneupmanship, each of us repeatedly reaching further back into ever more distant memories, in an attempt to finally attain that subtle social dominance conferred upon he who is finally recognized as more “old school” than the other.

At some point, I pulled out the oldest video game memory I have: Pong. Yep, Pong. I was running around when cabinet and tabletop Pong games were new. So new, in fact, that the first one I ever saw didn’t even have a slot for quarters; a plastic milk jug was screwed to the side of the cabinet of the Pong machine in a Shakey’s pizza place somewhere near where I lived, long ago.

There was a pause in the chat. Then he replied “what’s Pong?”. I knew he was joking, of course, ..right? He followed it up with “you’re old”, and “commit seppuku now”. Thinking quickly, I responded that instead I was waiting for the Sandmen to come and get me instead, but immediately realized that this reference to a 37-year-old novel, best known for its 28-year-old movie adaptation, merely compounded the stigma. Damn! He’s right, I’m ancient. Practically a fossil, to be sure. I started remembering all the other old toys I used to play with, like Mattel’s electronic football game (heck, even the vibrating-table football games), the venerable Atari 2600, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and toy guns that were actually cool. (Where did all the toy guns go? I just want to thank the social engineers that made people feel bad about selling them, because their disappearance has clearly made the whole planet so much safer.)

I played the original Zork on a dumb mainframe terminal. I copy-coded and played Hammurabi on a TRS-80 (32kB of RAM! Who could possibly use all that?), and have fond memories of Super Star Trek on my uncle’s Kaypro. Ah, the magic of BASIC. GOTO statements, anyone?

I was still thinking about it when I got home, and then it hit me: I belong to the last Analog Generation. I remember returning glass soda bottles to the grocery store for deposit, and TV vacuum tube testers in the drugstore. We even had a milkman, for God’s sake. Rotary-dial telephones and fire hydrants painted to celebrate the Bicentennial. Oh, and ice cream trucks weren’t the horrible, shabby, battered, dingy converted rapist vans they all seem to look like today. They were clean- at least the one that came down our block was. Seriously, what the hell is it with ice cream trucks these days? Would it kill them to at least keep painting over the grime?

Anyway: Yes. I’m old. I finally realize that now. My self-image of a 25-year-old me is irrevocably shattered. On the plus side, I no longer feel uncomfortable sneeringly dismissing anybody younger than 25 as a “kid”. I was already laughing at today’s new, hip fashion that I remember wearing in the 70s. A few years ago, somebody told me that bell bottoms were coming back, and that I would bow to the inevitable crush of fashion pressure and wear them. No. Never. As we used to say back in the Pleistocene, “fuck that”. I did my time in the 1970s, and I ain’t going back.

This old codger’s still got what it takes to school the noobs, however. Make no mistake.

Fuckin’ whippersnappers. “What’s Pong?”, indeed. Now get the hell off my lawn.