The Death of The Golden Age

I remember hearing about the golden age of comic books. Comics themselves reference this era with gleeful abandon, and a positive outlook that normally is only reserved for for elderly men sitting outside old convenience stores reminiscing about the "the good old days".
Yes, it was a simpler time back then. You knew who the villains were and you knew who you could trust. Oh, and lets not forget about the fact that the obsolete door-lock industry was in the slump, much to the benefit of the many and the lament of the few locksmiths trying to feed their families. As I sit here and type this, I too am reminiscing about a simpler time. It was not in the distant past, only to be remembered through stories told to me by my grandfather while roasting marshmallows around the campfire, no it was as far back as my senior year of high school which was the ancient year of 2002.
The thing I remember most about that year is that was the year my Dad bought me my own computer. Sure he would use it, but we both knew that I was the one it belonged to, especially since I was the one who had to put it together. That's right folks, my computer came in about fifteen different boxes and I had to put it together one day in the tech room after school.
That year my mom also got a computer, she got herself an eMac. It was a sexy looking piece of machinery with an infrared mouse and a delicious color scheme. She was a fan of puzzle games, so the guy at the store convinced her to buy Myst III: Exile. I was busy at the time tearing my way through Quake 3 Arena, with its polygonal eye-candy and detailed 256 color bitmap textures, so I didn't really want to waste my time with a boring game like the Myst series.
Needless to say though, I ended up putting the disk in and seeing what was so special about these games. I guess you could say that I was at the time a closet Macaddict. I would often sneak onto my mother's computer when she wasn't home. When it was her boxy little apple II I would play Dungeon of Doom, with her eMac I would play Cro-mag rally. Since Myst III could run on both our systems, I decided to install it on mine.
Several hours later I was still sitting in front of my computer, pulling a lever and watching a ball roll down a tube only to break something. I would then have to go and adjust the components that made up the ball, and then do it over again, noting down any changes. the tediouseness of the game was offset by the fact that I could turn around and stare across a massive expanse of water at a storm that was raging far away. The puzzles were mind-numbingly difficult, the only reason I made it as far as I did in the game was because I was lucky enough to accidently click on something that I didn't know was there. In the end though, the game was just too difficult for my FPS brain to deal with.
Now though, I am typing this on my own MacBook Pro, and my reflexes aren't what they used to be. I am like an old man when it comes to games like Halo, but I find myself thinking back to those slow-paced games and their infuriatingly difficult puzzles. Which is the reason that I am fully realizing that The Golden Age of Technology is over.
After spending the last few days trying to get my mother's copy of Myst III to work, I have come to the realization that the Cult of Mac has embraced change without fully thinking about the past. The fact that I am unable to get this game to work simply because my system has chosen to abandon it's roots frightens and angers me. It isn't simply a problem with Macintosh, although the fervor surrounding an announcement by Steve Jobs can be compared to the second coming of Jesus.
Think about the console wars. True, nowdays backwards compatability is a requirement, but compare our console wars and the quest for the next-gen gaming system to let's say the first televisions. Think about how often people bought new televisions. They didn't. They bought a television and that was the family television for the next fifteen years (if they were sensible). Now we buy a system and five years later we are planning for the new system to come out. I see a commercial for a new cell phone almost every month. I knew a girl who had a new phone every six months. I kept my phone for three years. Hell, it had a monochromatic background, no camera; it didn't even have polyphonic ringtones. The coolest thing my phone did was glow blue. I freaking loved that phone. I would still be using it today if it still worked.
Even the stalwart television is changing. in the last eight years, I have seen three major new television technologies come out. Which is more than the two decades before that can claim.
I am not saying that new isn't better, but I feel like we jump at every shiny new object that gets put in front of us. Instead of frothing at the mouth everytime a new cell phone, or game console, or computer operating system comes out; we should instead be asking ourselves what this new thing is going to fix about that old thing, and whether or not having said new thing is going to cut us off from our past. In a world changing as fast as ours, our roots are going to help define ourselves.