Time capsule

This post is for sheer fun and has nothing to do with Catholic medical school. Sorry! It mostly has to do with technology and the changes I see in the institutions I pass through. (Not including the Church.)

Grade school:

1. I learned to type in sixth grade.
2. Our first computer looked like this (right). It had an internal floppy drive, Power Pete, Glider Pro, and Kid Pix. (I remember all the important stuff, including the opening screen, below left.)
3. I had a walkman to play hand-me-down CDs. I thought it was pretty awesome. (Bottom-right picture, upper-left object.)
4. I had a gameboy color (below center). The biggest cartridge we had was pokemon pinball, which was 2"x2", plus a part about the size of an AA battery which protruded from the cartridge slot. This part actually held an AA battery and enabled the novel "vibrate" feature.

High school:

1. First laptop: I had an external floppy drive and an internet card that protruded an inch from the computer. It lit up when it was working, which was when it got signals from the cockroach-shaped modem on the wall. 
2. The older girls in high school had internal floppy drives and internet cards with two little antennae. The younger girls had (gasp) tablets.
3. Some of my friends had cell phones. (Whoa!) They were almost all thick clamshells; some had stubby antennae, and some antennae were extendable.
4. AIM was new. I IM'd during class, and I was floored by the bots that you could IM with. They were pretty dumb, but I was still surprised at how much they could do.
5. I watched how the gameboy grew up, especially how the DS had a quick facelift from windows-style to apple-style as the latter company took over the younger consumer demographic.
6. Our family moved from our first macintosh to the iMac, then the eMac. I missed Power Pete, but enjoyed Bugdom.
7. We got a gamecube.

College:

1. First cell phone! A motorola; I washed it after the mud tug-of-war a few weeks into school. My second phone was a Sony Ericsson walkman phone. I loved it! It was so durable and tiny. The background picture was the Blessed Sacrament exposed in the old TAC Chapel.
2. Between my High School Summer Great Books Program and my TAC graduation the college built St. Thomas Hall and Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel from the ground. For the first year and a half of my education, the chapel was a walled-off third of the cafeteria.
3. The oaks adjacent to St. Monica's and the library would fall to rot during my stay, and the wild peacocks would be banished due to too much noise and mess. 
4. Dr. Dillon and Mr. Berquist attended my convocation, but theirs were the first funerals in the Chapel. At my graduation Dr. McLean signed my diploma and Mrs. Berquist received an award in honor of her late husband.
5. I gave library tours centered around TAC's copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, unretouched except for peripheral annotations. This and other glorious works might be sold to build the last few campus buildings (because when I went to TAC, St. Patrick's was a portable and the gym and auditorium were fantasies).

Med School:

1. IWhen I entered my medical school, the "2 years basic, 2 years clinical" paradigm described their curriculum very well. Things are changing...
2. I have performed a gram stain (although not in my medical education).
3. No one lacks a bachelor's degree in my class (to my knowledge), though this may become more common in the future
4. I took the old MCAT on April 10, 2010.
5. I dissected.

And more changes to come...