>Man. If UF was a person it'd be old enough to drink pretty soon.

It's kind of funny to me that the "hey, look at this old thing" post is, itself, now getting kind of old.

So yeah! Tonight--technically, a couple of hours ago, at this point--makes a round thirty years since I posted the original Undocumented Features to USENET, from my account on the good ol' Encore at WPI. What a bizarre thing to contemplate. I wasn't great at envisioning the actual, as opposed to fictional, future in 1991, but if I had ever thought about it at all, I doubt I would have imagined that 48-year-old me would even remember doing this without prompting, let alone still be doing it!

Unfortunately, this little observance is all I've got for you on the actual day. I had a couple of ideas for more... concrete ways to mark the milestone, but between one thing and another, they just didn't come together. Sorry about that. I hope normal service will be resumed soon, but, as always, I'm not really the one who gets to determine that.

In the meantime, let us reflect that when Undocumented Features began, the world population was estimated at just a hair under 5.5 billion people (it's now closing in on 8 billion). The Soviet Union was still a thing (barely--it dissolved about six weeks later). Airbags were not yet required in automobiles in the United States (although some form of passive restraint had been since 1989). The WorldWideWeb was still one word and had no servers outside the European scientific community. DVDs wouldn't be invented for another four years. The Super Nintendo had only been out in the United States for a couple of months. There was no such company as Google. There was only one Terminator movie. The largest corporation in the world was General Motors. And the number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100 was "Cream" by Prince and the New Power Generation.

Yeah. Strange days.

(NOTE: Strange Days came out in 1995.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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