The annual world of college freshmen

Every fall with the start of the new school year, there is a yearly list of things that the incoming college freshmen have never known or experienced.  This year’s college freshmen were generally born in 1990.  Among the interesting facts from this year’s list published by Beloit College are: 

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  • 18) WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
  • 28) IBM has never made typewriters.
  • 36) Kids may have been given a Nintendo Game Boy to play with in the crib
  • 51) Windows 3.0 operating system made PCs user-friendly

 My own son is many years off from college, but its interesting to reflect on things that he will never have considered.  

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  • He’ll never know dial-up internet.  
  • There will always have been people living in space.
  • He’s never seen a skyline of NYC with a World Trade Center
  • He’s always been driven on roads where there were lots of vehicles on the road that could run on electricity (at least some of the time) instead of gasoline.
  • He could never buy Poloroid film
  • The video game industry has always been bigger than the movie industry
  • He’ll never know a time when either an African-American or a women wasn’t elected to either a president or vice-president position
  • “To google” has always been a verb

  I wonder which of these questions in the will have been resolved by then: 

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  • Textbooks will no longer be available in print
  • PDA’s, e-book readers, cell phones and laptops will have converged into a single device
  • Moore’s Law will have reached the limits of physics

 It’s always a fun thing to consider, particularly on a holiday afternoon while the boy’s napping.