Ten Years Ago…

As we come upon the tail end of 2007 and the year 2008 is staring us smack in the face, reminding us that we’re all another year closer to croaking of old age, I got to thinking about how much things have changed in the past decade. Every year and every decade, it seems like things change faster and faster. From the late nineties to the late naughties (tee hee) is no exception, and from the late eighties to now’s even greater. We’re living in the future, folks.

A lot of these are technology-related, because of the way advances in gadgetry has shaped our lives. Today, even your car has enough electronics in your face to look like Darth Vader’s bathroom. However, I’ll try to throw in some other memories. We’ll just see how things go.

Ten Years Ago…

• The Chef’s computer was a Packard Bell Pentium 60, which was merely obsolete then and not ludicrously obsolete. You could, if you were so inclined, get by with a mere 32MB of RAM. It was running Windows 95.
• I knew one person who had a CD burner. He also had a SCSI hard drive with 3GB of space, which was sort of cutting edge back then. Naturally, the entire drive was filled with porn (some things haven’t changed).
• Some people were beginning to get the notion that this whole “internet” thing just might have some usefulness.
• My internet connection was 14.4 dial-up. The fastest dial-up then was 48.8. Today, my connection is a satellite connection at 512K (yes, it’s slow, but I live in the sticks (Or is that the Styx?) where I can’t get real broadband service. No one knew what a wireless router, or that you could use one to turn a whole building into an internet hot spot.
• Ten years ago, I was in college. I’m goddamned old.
• Cell phones were the size of cordless ones, had black and white screens, and didn’t play games or surf the internet or play music or anything else – they just made phone calls. No one had heard of text messaging, either, which is a sure sign that those were better times.
• Instead of message boards, we had something called “Usenet”.
• Ten years ago, alt.toys.transformers was an active and largely positive fan community, not a nearly-dead troll-filled cesspool.
• No one knew what Google was. Yahoo was around, but had yet to become the bloated evil online empire it is now.
• Ten years ago, country music didn’t suck. Rap “music” (for lack of a suitably malodorous term), however, did and still does.
• People still used cassette tapes (both audio and video). No one knew what the hell a DVD was, much less HD or any other crap that I don’t know about because I’m a Luddite who lives in the past.
• No one had heard of MP3s. I think the format was around, but no one used it and certainly no one had a pocket-sized brain-melting device from Planet Vulcan that could play the damn things.
• No one would have thought that in a decade, the major players in video game systems would be Sony and Microsoft, and Nintendo would be reduced to second-banana status.
• In 1997, I was still playing Rifts and Nightbane, back when Palladium didn’t suck and wasn’t nearly bankrupt thanks to Big Kev’s stupidity.
• Ten years ago, I started my first web site. It was hosted on Geocities and the entire site could be backed up on a single floppy disk, because Geocities had a 1MB space limit. That site, The Gate, was dedicated to Palladium RPGs. It lasted until 2004, and was host to Shadows of the South, a huge netbook for Nightbane that no one remembers now.
• While we’re at it, ten years ago floppy disks were relevant and useful.
• Ten years ago, no one knew what the hell an MMO was, because they hadn’t been invented yet. Instead, we had various MU*s. Believe it or not, you can play an entirely text-based game.
• No one seriously believed that George Lucas was going to make more Star Wars movies.
• Remember that Y2K thing? Some pundits and panicmongers were already starting to babble about it. Unfortunately, they were right; planes fell out of the air, ATMs stopped working, millions of bank records were lost, the government collapsed, and chaos descended, plunging the entire world into a thousand years of darkness. And you missed it.
• Ten years ago, I had a mullet.
• Duke Nukem Forever was being developed. It still hasn’t been released.

Not Much More Than Ten Years Ago…

• I did my first online research in 1995 on AOL. That was before the World Wide Web, and was done via newsgroups, Gopher and FTP (Anyone remember those?). That was with the aforementioned Pentium 60. Holy fucking God – this means I’ve been online for more than a decade. Scary, ne?

• Five years before that, in 1990, I was using an 8mhz 286 with an entire megabyte of RAM (well, 640K, for all practical purposes) and a 40MB hard drive. I remember being thrilled and astounded when I added a sound card. If I could’ve added a CD-ROM to it, I probably would’ve needed a change of shorts. Today, my cell phone is more powerful than that computer.

Twenty Years Ago (Maybe A Little More)…

• My computer was a Commodore 64, and for 1984 it was ludicrously powerful. I still miss the old breadbox.
• Twenty years ago, they said we’d have flying cars by the year 2008. Where’s my goddamned flying car? Damn you, Paul Moller!
• Twenty years ago, the Maitre d’s head still looked like an uncommonly large potato.

About The Chef

The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.

Your host, hero to millions, the Chef.

Oblivious, the dumpster containing the infant Chef sped on. It crashed on a small blue world due to a freakish loophole in the laws of nature that virtually guarantees any object shot randomly into space will always land on Earth. The garbage scow remained buried in the icy wastes of the frozen north until the Chef awoke in 1901. Unfortunately, a passing Norwegian sailor accidentally drove a boat through his head, causing him to go back to sleep for another 23 years.

When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.

Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".

His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.

When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.

After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.

Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).

Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.

Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.

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