Young Lingo vs. Old Spelling

I'm old enough to be one of those guys who didn't grow up using a PC and surfing the Internet.
When I was a kid in grammar school, there were computers, alright, but you didn't see them in everybody's house like you do these days.
Computers were things you saw in a photograph in a newspaper, a magazine, or on TV, and were used in a scientific laboratory or some kind of bureaucratic office, old-fashioned reel-to-reel magnetic tape reels spinning around.

The very few people that had some kind of personal computer were bona-fide geeks that liked to screw around with electronics as a hobby, and those early PCs were totally crude, slow, and not powerful at all.
In fact, when I made it into the 9th grade in 1979 (yeah, I'm an old fart to all of you young-uns), we were allowed to screw with the PCs the electronics shop had, some Radio Shack TRS-80s.
These were so slow and crummy compared to today's personal computers, that having the geeks in class write a silly program to make the word "HI!" scroll down the screen was reason for celebration.
In fact, I thought the geekiest geeks in class were going to jerk each other off, they were so excited by this.
I thought that this sucked, and felt that if this was the state of personal computing in 1979, I'd pass until something genuinely interesting came along.
No thanks, I thought - I'll ride dirt bikes, instead, and learn about those. :)

It wasn't until around 1995 or 1996 where the Internet as we know it today finally started to take off, and all of a sudden, PCs got a whole lot better.
It seemed like overnight, TV commercials were giving Internet addresses for consumers (you and me) to go to their websites and check out their products.
Within a year or two, it seemed that we'd finally reached to point where PCs were capable of doing more than being just a hobby for geeks with WD-40 pocket protectors full of pens.
I felt I should join the bandwagon, but since I didn't live alone at the time, I dragged my feet because I could picture spending the money on a PC, only to have it get smashed to bits.

Finally, in January of 2001, I bought my first PC and got on-line with the Internet.
All through grammar school in the mid-1970s, I'd been told that one day, I'd be doing my shopping via computer and not have to go to a store, but communicate with the seller via computer.
Well, it took 25 years for us to get that far, but it did arrive.
I liked it, and probably what I liked most was reading about subjects that interested me, as well as joining message boards having to do with the motorcycles that I liked so much (and had been making my living with for 13-and-a-half years by this point).
It was then that I was introduced to Internet lingo.

You know what that is.
Here's a sample:

hi
how r u?

Or:

lol im dying over here

I had to accept the poor spelling and lack of punctuation as how it was going to be.
Sometime, I'd have to read something a couple of times to be sure I got it right.
There were also lots of people who were pretty snooty and thought of themselves as Internet experts, using all kinds of crypted acronyms and abbreviations.
There was basically an elite PC language forming out there, and younger people who were basically growing up using a PC and the Internet were adopting it as their way of communicating.
In fact, if you weren't using this lingo, YOU were the geek.
My, how things change.
In fact, reading somebody's typing is often a good gauge of how old they are and/or how often they use the Internet to communicate.
The general rule of thumb in my mind is that anybody using this hip lingo was born in 1990 or later.
They're young enough to have not known life without a PC around, either in school or at home.

Off to jerk,
-John