Do you remember AIM 1.0? Do you remember when screenames could only have ten characters? Do you remember a time when getting somebody's screename was much, much more likely (and exciting!) than getting somebody's cell phone number? Did you ever have warning wars? Did you have involved conversations with SmarterChild and then update your Expage with the transcript? Did you spend time with Notepad editing your profile HTML so you could fit more information into those measly 1024 bytes? Did you constantly monitor all the screenames that clicked on your SubProfile link? Did you measure your popularity based on Guestbook entries in said SubProfile? Do you remember when people started getting broadband internet and competed for the longest online time? Do you still have a screenshot of somebody having been online for 16 days 8 hours 22 minutes somewhere, maybe on a Zip disk? Do you ever long for the days where "status updates" could also have fonts and colors and line breaks and weren't there for everybody to read long after you'd taken them down?

Enough questions. Time to right-click => Get Info...


(I believe the screename belongs to a bot - didn't feel like editing it out of the found screenshot. Intensely accurate profile Photoshopping thanks to yours truly.)

If you were in a Virginia Beach middle school, chances are that in the 6th and 7th grades you received a little flier about a Saturday Enrichment Program at TCC. I bet a ton of you saw something about classes on a Saturday and tossed that shit before your parents could get on it, but the nerdiest of the nerds (a.k.a. kids who were nerdy even among their KLMS peers) actually read the thing and thought, “ooo that sounds kind of interesting.”

You could choose one of three tracks: Physical Science, Science and Technology, and Biological and Chemical Sciences. You indicated your preferences and got entered into a lottery and, if you were lucky, you got put into the track you wanted along with all of your nerdy friends. I went both years, although I can't remember which programs I was in. I'm guessing I was in Physical Science one year and Science and Technology the other.

Things that I do remember, though mostly a little vaguely:

• learning AutoCAD, mostly using the keyboard / command line
  
• creating slideshows in AutoCAD using some very basic scripting
• doing some very, very primitive 3D rendering, also in AutoCAD
• being taught the importance of grounding yourself when working on computers
• attempting to memorize all the equations for conic sections
• being shown a disgusting black smoker lung (quite enough reason to be a non-smoker for life)
• going to the NOAA Chesapeake Bay headquarters and learning how to read weather maps
• measuring water depth and creating topographic maps of the river/bay bed
  
• testing water and netting sea life on a boat

Let's face it - those are some pretty complex topics for a bunch of 11 year olds. It was also a slap in the face when, 6 years later, I had to take Magnet Technology Foundations and was forced to sit through what appeared to be AutoCAD for Massive Idiots Who Don't Understand the Command Line. That doesn't mean my classmates were all massive idiots - it was just the way it was taught. If you know the class I am talking about, you know exactly what I mean.

Gratuitous picture so the post isn't all text:

In Chesapeake, once you were identified as a gifted fifth or sixth-grader, you were carted off to Indian River Middle School Annex once a week for GATE (Gifted and Talented Education). This is where you got to do things like design rollercoasters using ACAD...

...watch decade-old episodes of the Voyage of the Mimi starring a young Ben Affleck...

...learning about orienteering in the common area where the portables were...

...learn to count in Mayan...

...copy Alley Cat from your teacher's 5.25" floppy onto your hard disk...

...take field trips to the NATO headquarters...

...and make an Egyptian (death) mask out of papier mache.

Then at the end of the day, you all trooped back on the bus and went back to your home school to do times tables with the regular kids.

(Photos, from top: NewFreeDownloads.com, Entertainment Weekly, Berkshire Sport, Mexico Connect, Retro CPU, Julia Shea, DLTK)

Maybe the whole class trooped down the hall to the computer lab (quietly behind the line leader, of course) or else you were rewarded with time at the classroom computer for doing your work, but we all know what the best part was:


My favorite memories are the random voices counting and the exploding firecracker. What were yours?

(screenshot via Wikipedia)