There’s something delightfully analog about growing up before smartphones. We don’t have TikTok timelines or Instagram reels of high school. Our memories live on dusty Hi8 and DV tapes, glitchy, lo-fi fragments from a time before social media ruled our lives.

Back in Latimer, Mississippi, our English teacher Vadis Perkins, a true visionary, gave us the green light to launch a morning news show at St. Martin High. She handed us a makeshift newsroom: a few camcorders, some clear tape, and a ton of enthusiasm. We recorded, spliced, and narrated, one linear edit at a time.

Then I showed up, the resident tech nerd, and said, “Let’s Firewire and BeOS‑ify this.” Tape-to-tape gave way to real-time capture. BeOS on those ancient lab machines crushed video editing compared to the sluggish Windows setups of the time. It felt like jumping from a rotary phone to a smartphone overnight.

That little project snowballed. Soon, I was managing the school’s computers and network with Gordon Nelms. I wasn’t in class much after that, I was the “computer guy.” I learned more through crashed systems and cable runs than any textbook ever taught. From building Linux fileservers to pulling Ethernet to replace coax, it was hands-on, trial-by-fire. I’d done help desk in Germany, but this was my first taste of supporting an entire organization.

Fast forward 20-plus years. My parents moved to Michigan and unearthed a box of those old tapes. Cue Linux, OBS, and frame-by-frame video conversion. Watching them now is surreal. There I am, reporting school news, fumbling with hair gel, already a decade into BBSs and IRC, while my classmates were just figuring out T9 texting. We were the bridge generation, told to come home when the streetlights flickered on, yet fluent in a digital world that was still forming.

These videos remind me how we lived in two timelines at once. Not fully digital natives, not quite analog relics either. We built the cables, dubbed the tapes, rebooted the machines, and scrapped in the hallways after school just because we could.

Now, watching my own kid grow up in an age where her whole childhood lives in the cloud, I find a strange comfort in those analog gaps. Maybe those missing pixels, those blurry, tethered moments, are what shaped us. We had a kind of anonymity future generations may never know. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what made us whole.