Who remembers "PONG?"

I understand that the electronic game called "PONG" is making a comeback. Or so I've heard. Do you guys remember the first time we ever laid eyes on PONG? For me, it was at the place we called the "pool hall" on Main street - the one that Frank Farrer owned and ran. PONG was a video game designed by Atari in 1972 that quickly became very popular. PONG was the coolest thing going (certainly at Farrer's pool hall) because its graphics were capable of responding to real time reactions from the user / player. (I never mastered the game. I couldn't put "spin" on the ball like some of you could!). Last year, there was even some kind of campaign to pit Andy Roddick against an updated version of the original Atari product.

I know this kind of talk horrifies our kids (I'm speaking vicarioulsy because I don't have any), but aside from our interaction with PONG, can you all fathom that that we survived ALL of high school WITHOUT A COMPUTER?? Heck, we were lucky to have a Spanish class, much less a "PC room."

Yes, PONG was amazing, since the personal computer craze didn't really start until years past our graduation. I'm sure some of the bigger high schools (as in Little Rock or Pine Bluff) were offering computer programming for main frames, but not even those schools were touting any PC classes - and certainly no laptops.

Around 1983, you may remember a movie starring Matthew Broderick called "War Games." In it, a high school kid (Broderick), that was sort of a computer nerd, wound up hacking into a high-level military computer system that controlled our nation's missle defense network. His so-called high-tech computer setup featured a clunky green-screened computer monitor, an old-fashioned desktop computer and (get this) a dial-up connection that could only be used with an acoustic coupler (a fancy way of describing a slow data connection that involves putting your telephone handset into rubber cups that, in turn, connect to a telephone line).

A few years later in 1995, Sandra Bullock starred in yet another version of the "internet gone wild," this time called "The 'Net". Her technology of choice was far beyond Broderick's old fashioned desktop PCs and dial up modems, but now even the technology of "The Net" is ancient history. For example, I just drove to Target and picked up a 2-gig flashdrive to store miscellaneous files. Did you catch that? I said "2 gigabyte" as in 2,000 million bytes, folks.

When we were graduating, there might have been some "floppy" drives around that could hold maybe 100,000 bytes. I'm not sure what the former storage disks cost, but I invested a whopping $35 dollars - and for $75 I could have walked out with a 4 gig drive. Contrast this with Bill Gates startling lack of insight when he inferred early on that a 20 meg hard drive should last consumers forever. Even Bill Gates can be blindsided by progress apparently!

Anyway, anyway...I digress. I just can't imagine now how we survived the '70s without the aid of a computer, the Internet, email, cell phones and text messaging. Maybe instead, we actually wrote letters by hand or picked up those rotary dial (or "pushbutton") telephones and called each other? Even worse, we might have actually spent some time (in person) in each others homes. Fancy that!