Age (noun) is a number of solar revolutions, that’s all. Truthfully, people “age” (verb) (both physically and mentally) at different rates. Nothing has proven that to me more than having coworkers with spouses, two kids, and gray hairs who are chronologically younger than me and yet might as well be 20 years older than me.
My first (used, not owned) Apple was an Apple IIe where I learned to do basic auto-CAD. Later we had a computer lab full of the pizza box Macintosh Performa 405s:
I’m not quite a digital native, I’m a bit too old for that. But I’m definitely an early digital immigrant. I had my own computer in the home by the time I was about 11 or 12, but had already used them for a few years at that point. Not that I could do much with the Apple IIs. At home, too, with that first home computer, we got internet not long after because my father was in graduate school. We had one of those ridiculous modems where you physically put the phone on the modem briefly. It was wild. We cycled through Prodigi and CompuServ and AOL before finally getting standard dial-up. I know some of it the university covered for my father, but in must have been terribly expensive.
Oh, I just remembered, true story. In 7th grade, I got in trouble at school and my parents got called in to the CS teacher’s office because all the 405s were configured to allow the teacher to take control of all of them from his computer… and I managed to find backdoor access and take control of his computer as well as the others. I put up some animations on that flip-book app of anime characters (I don’t know whether this was OS 8 or 9) and he was not amused. I got a lecture in front of my parents about how Hacking Is Bad Mmmkay. I am almost certain I did nothing l33t hax0rz, the teacher just didn’t secure everything. I wasn’t THAT smart at 12.