Lori Rasmussen

As one of the older students in the Communications@Syracuse program, I chuckled a little bit during this week’s discussion of things we most remember or liked about the 1990s. I was actually a working adult during this decade, got married, had my first child, saw Paris for the first time as a college student and generally just had a great time.

I remember the first time I ever heard the term “e-mail” around 1991 while working in retail (it came to us through the point-of-sale system and printed out on receipt tape). I vividly recall my first experience with the Internet on a personal computer around 1993; my older brother and his friends, recent college grads, were experimenting with desktop publishing and showed me these cool things called “websites.” Within a year or so, I was on AOL and playing around with the Internet myself.

I remember the semester of college where we were offered online enrollment as an option for the first time; by the time I graduated, standing in line to enroll was a thing of the past. During college, I worked as a reservation agent for Southwest Airlines at a call center in Oklahoma City. We were instructed to tell callers they might be able to get lower fares online on the new southwest.com website; I remember a caller telling me there was no way he was EVER putting his credit card number on the Internet. Which I thought was funny, because he had just given his credit card number to me, a complete stranger.

In Paris in 1998 and living in a Sorbonne dorm during a foreign exchange program, we were told how lucky we were that in addition to expensive phone calls home, we also had the option of visiting a nearby Internet café to send an email. By the time I went to Switzerland in 2001, the dorms had PCs, and frequent emails had replaced phone calls altogether.

We got our first digital camera in 1999 after my son was born, we had the pictures printed. We were typical proud parents – there were thousands of photos which all reside now in a box somewhere. Now? I can’t even remember the last time I printed a photo. My daughter who was born in 2011 enjoys scrolling through my historical Facebook feed to see her baby photos. At age six, she’s the only one in the family who doesn’t yet have her own smart phone, but that day is probably coming soon.

As all these changes were taking place over time, I remember at first not feeling terribly tech-savvy and having a little anxiety about all of it. Over time, I got more and more comfortable and instead of anxious I get really excited about learning new tech programs. I enjoy the challenge of figuring out problems when they pop up. The biggest compliment I’ve received in a while was when my teenaged daughter told me I’m far beyond most of her friends’ moms in terms of tech astuteness, so “thanks for not embarrassing me.”

My point in these recollections is that these things we are talking about in class aren’t ancient history to me – I was there when it happened and it was exciting to watch! In retrospect I was watching world-changing history in the making. I think many people as they get older tend to romanticize “the good old days,” but by God I NEVER want to go back to the days when I didn’t have an internet-connected mobile device in my hands all the time. It’s my auxiliary brain; I’m not even sure how I ever got by without it. Those were dark, dark days indeed.