Tony Soprano had a great line in this last week’s Sopranos episode where he wasn’t participating in a dinner table conversation with some gangster in Miami, Paulie Walnuts and 3 whores.  Paulie and the other guy were reminiscing about their heyday and finally they asked Tony why he was uncharacteristically silent.  Tony replied “The lowest form of conversation is ‘Remember When’” and he proceeded to walk away from the table while gesturing for his own whore to get up and follow him.

I hate to go against a TV gangster but the weekend I was at Bradley not too long ago really did bring back some enjoyable “Remember When” stories.  The key is to remember and cherish the past; just don’t live in it.  While that weekend in Peoria was full of reminiscing and the continued reminders that one is indeed aging quickly, I thought about technology around the time I graduated from Bradley (December 1994).

As someone who started out, and still is in, the software business, it might seem odd that even as early as January 1995 when I began working in the Real World that email was not something everyone had at CCC Information Services.  Even in our company, knee-deep in the I.T. field (Collision Estimating software for body shops, insurance companies, and salvage yards), only provided email software for managers and executives (CCMail was the app of choice at the time).  Any company-wide memo actually came in tangible paper form delivered to our mailboxes.  Remember mailrooms?  Now they’re only used for when people get trade magazines or junk mail at work.

I don’t think it was until 1996 when they bought Lotus Notes for everyone in the company before the Email Revolution began.  Now that I think about it, the main reason I never got an email address while at Bradley was because if you wanted one, you had to manually fill out an application in the Computer Science hall and I simply never felt like doing that.  I had more important things to worry about such as did I have enough beer to last me the weekend and which psycho girl was I trying to avoid that weekend.  At that time, having an email address had the same stigma as being an active Dungeons & Dragons participant.

Now that I’m the proud owner of a CrackBerry, which allows me to tie 5 email accounts to my inbox at once, living without email seems almost incomprehensible.  It sounds dumb but when I login to my Yahoo account in the morning and see 3 New Messages, I’m sort of disappointed.  If I see 19 New Messages, I know that a good email string is going around or something else new to read.

Even now I still encounter old friends who just got into “this newfangled email thingy”.  One must be patient with these noobs while they forward you countless rehashed jokes, rumors, .ppt and .wmv files and countless other assorted crap that we all first experienced 10+ years ago.  Introducing them to snopes.com is one of the best things a friend can do.  Tell them “If you don’t see it on Snopes, then feel free to send it to me.”