Do You Remember When RAM Was a Luxury?
I left class to chase girls. Turns out, I was ghosting the future.
There was a time when RAM was a luxury, not a metaphor for your mental state.
In 1982, my school computer had 64 kilobytes of memory. That’s kilo, not mega. It was just enough to load MS-DOS, flash a blinking cursor, and run a math game with graphics that looked like they’d been drawn by a nervous toaster.
Every command felt like a gamble. Type one wrong letter, and the machine would blink at you like a disappointed parent. No mouse. No icons. Just a beige box and the existential thrill of C:\>.
It was slow, limited, and oddly magical. Until it wasn’t.
I dropped out of computer class, joined the school band, and learned something more important than coding:
You can run out of memory in more ways than one.
Hi, I’m no-one, and this is a true story about drumsticks, floppy disks, and what it means to remember slowly.
The Band Was 30 People. The Girls Were 24 of Them.
My adolescent logic surmised the school band had way better odds.
The band had around 30 kids. Only six were boys—three on drums (me included), and three playing trumpet. The rest?
All girls.
The strategy was simple: play drums → be surrounded by girls → one of them has to like me.
Foolproof!
Guess what? Epic fail.
I painfully realized my chances did not improve while banging out 4/4 rhythms and pretending to know what a paradiddle was. I didn’t get a date. I didn’t get a solo. I did, however, get a permanent spot behind a snare drum and a slow realization that charm is not percussive.
Still, no regrets.
What We Thought Was the Future... Was the First Draft
Looking back, it’s honestly wild how primitive everything was. The computers were basically typewriters with commitment issues. The software was like a DIY puzzle where the pieces were invisible unless you typed exactly the right command.
Fast forward to today: We talk to a computer, and it talks back. We carry a phone that’s faster than every computer in that classroom combined. Our watches can probably render Lemonade Stand; yes, the clunky 1980s math game, in 3D.
And the part that blows my mind the most? I remember when none of this existed. I got to watch it all unfold: the slow, miraculous evolution from digital caveman tools to the AI-powered, cloud-synced, sentient convenience machines we have now.
I may not have gotten the girl, but I did get a front-row seat to one of the greatest transformations in human history.
Some Observations from a Time-Traveling Middle Schooler:
- Floppy disks were floppy. Like, actually bendy. Why did we trust them?
- MS-DOS didn't suffer fools. You made a typo? It made you pay.
- Drumsticks are poor instruments of seduction.
- 24 girls, 6 boys, zero dates. Math is a liar.
- AI now does in seconds what used to take us all period.
- Typing “COPY A:\FILE.TXT C:\DOCS” after the C:\> prompt made you feel like a wizard.
Where the Cursor Used to Blink
In a world running on gigabytes and gig economy speed, it's grounding to recall when everything was slower, weirder, and smelled faintly of burning dust and chalkboards. It's worth holding space for those little reflections, the absurd ones, the nostalgic ones, and the ones that make you wonder: how did we get from there to here?
At the Prompt
I didn’t stick with the machines. I stuck with the memories.
They taught me something that still matters now:
Even the slowest systems—digital or human—can carry what counts.