When Did I Become a Dinosaur?

     I just started my first graduate class.  I've taken a few post baccalaureate classes recently, in order to get my feet wet.  Now that I'm in the deep end, I find myself marveling at the technology that is available now.
     When I was an undergrad umpteen years ago, the internet was in its infancy.  We all had dial up, every single last person. Logging into an email account remotely was quite the task.  People used to pay for AOL accounts.  There was no wireless internet.  You needed a cable and a special card to use with your modem if you were accessing the colleges internet connection.  We used to save our documents on these plastic things called floppy disks, or if you were lucky enough to have a CD burner, you could write it to a CD, but not re-write depsite the label of RW on the CD case.
     I'm really marveling at the technology that's available for doing academic research.  See, there was no really good search engine back then.  The internet was seen as unreliable.  I remember being discouraged from citing internet sources in my Freshman English course.  I was a History major, and the majority of my sources were dusty old books, and I was just fine with that.  I was great at using a card catalog when looking for books.
     When I had to do a project on more current events, I got to use micro film or micro fiche. For those born after 1990, that is like a scanned document, but a negative of it that has to be magnified.  If you don't know what a negative is, just stop reading now.  I got to be quite good at going through those machines.  When I interned at a library, I got very good at trouble shooting when there were problems with said machines. I could probably include microfiche and film reader repair in my list of skills on Linked-In, not that anyone would find that skill relevant today.
     On occasion I used journal articles.  We felt very lucky that there was a computerized database that allowed us to search for articles.  This was a vast improvement over the old indexes that were in the Reference section. Still, once you located an article in said data base, you had to hope the library you were in had the journal, pull the physical book that housed the journal, and photo copy your article of choice.  Now, I don't even need to go to the library to do a search.  I can do it from my home computer.  Then once I find an article I'm interested in using, most of them link right to the PDF file.  No more trekking over to the SUNYA library for journals not in my college's library.  No more photocopies at $.10 a page.
     Today was the death blow to my ego.  I had seen online that there was a hold on my account for a signature on my financial aid forms.  I happily strolled over to the Student Services Center, only to be told they were no physical forms to sign.  The signature was required on an online form.  My mind was blown.  Signature no longer means your name scrawled out in cursive on a piece of paper.  It's an online pin number and check boxes.  It's official.  I am a dinosaur.