I don’t, at the moment, feel that old.

But whenever I want to explain to college kids just how painfully young they are, I put my college years in context for them by dispensing this factoid:  at no point in my undergraduate career did I ever have email.

When they realize I’m not joking, they then usually ask if I rode a brontosaurus to class, or if I saddled up a triceratops instead.  I proceed to regale them with the story of my arrival on campus as a wide-eyed freshman.

In August of 1989, my parents, my brother, and I, plus all the stuff they had packed for the week-long trip, plus all the stuff I had packed for my first year at college, arrived on campus, all of it contained in a four-door Honda Accord.

In addition to my clothes, towels, bedding, and toiletries, I brought what I believed to be the essentials for college success:  my mix tapes (including the fabled “The Best of Everything” and its sequel, “The Best of Everything Else”), my “Basketball by Barkley” t-shirt, my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and my electric typewriter.

Immediately, these youngsters begin to imagine me in sepia tones.

Needless to say, times have changed.  But I didn’t appreciate just how much times had changed until I spied Best Buy’s Back to School Tech List, a flyer detailing the “Top 15 must-haves for this year’s college student.”

The list is divided into “Essentials for Academic Success” and “Essentials for College Life.”  Indulge me while I give you a quick rundown of these must-have items.

The Essentials for Academic Success:

• Computer.  In four years, I never had one.  Moved up to a Brother word processor between my sophomore and junior years, though, if that counts for anything.  It was just like a computer, only it had a green screen that showed you only seven lines at a time, no hard drive and no mouse.
• Geek Squad Computer Support.  We did have a geek squad at my school.  They were called “Electrical Engineers.”
• Printer/Paper/Ink.  We had paper and ink back then, I’m pretty sure.  But my electric typewriter (and later, the word processor) printed just fine.  Who needed a printer?
• Notebook Bag.  We used to call this a “backpack,” and it was very uncool to wear both straps over your shoulders, unlike nowadays.  But I think here Best Buy is referring to a bag in which you carry your laptop, and, well, since I had no computer, it goes without saying I had no laptop bag.
• Computer Software, Computer Accessories, Cables.  Have I mentioned my electric typewriter?
• Media Storage.  “From flash drives to external hard drives, blank CDs to DVDs, storage options for documents, photos, music and other digital files are plentiful,” the flyer proclaims.  It pains me just to read this.  We had no flash drives.  We had no external hard drives.  DVDs did not yet exist, and the first consumer digital cameras and the photos they produced were still half a decade away.  We had no blank CDs.  But, lest you think we were all backstroking in the primordial soup, we did have CDs:  Bad Company.  Journey, and Aerosmith.  Fine Young Cannibals.  Later, the Spin Doctors.  And Hammer.

The Essentials for College Life:

• Cell Phone & Plans.  We had a land line, only we didn’t call it a land line:  we called it a “phone.”  Our plan was, when one of us was on the “phone” talking to his parents, the others of us would leave the room.  (This was also the plan if anybody ever managed to bring a “girl” back to the room.  Unfortunately, I lived in a triple, and the only roommate who ever managed to bring anybody back to the room was also the roommate who creeped out all the girls on the floor.)
• Digital Camera.  The first commercially available digital camera was released in 1991.  It cost $13,000.
• Flat Panel TV.  Okay, really now, are they serious about this?  I’m 35, and I don’t have a flat panel TV!  This is an essential for college life?  Look, Best Buy, I realize you’re trying to move product, but please, let’s have some perspective here.  My freshman year the three of us shared a used 14” black and white TV.  With rabbit ears.
• iPod/MP3 player.  My roommate (the cool one) had a CD player, and I got my first CD player before my junior year.  Does that count?
• Mini-Fridge/Microwave.  Yes!  Finally, some technology that’s survived from my generation to this one!
• Coffeemaker.  The RAs sounded really serious about the “no hot plates in the dorm room” rule, which would’ve been an effective deterrent, if not for the fact that not a single college student I knew at the time drank coffee.  Coffee was not served in the cafeteria.  There were no cafes.  If you had to stay up all night writing a paper, you loaded up on quarters and kept punching the Mountain Dew button on the vending machine.  Unless you had a mini-fridge.
• Music, Movies and Games.  “You know the saying,” writes the Best Buy copywriter, “all work and no play is, well, lame.”  I don’t have a joke here.

By the time I got to the end of that list, I felt very old.  When I was living through it, 1989 didn’t exactly seem like the age of innocence.  In retrospect, maybe it was.

And yet in so many ways, it doesn’t seem that long ago.  I mean, I still have that “Basketball by Barkley” t-shirt!  I still wear that “Basketball by Barkley” t-shirt!

Hang on a second.  It’s 2007, right?  And this year’s college freshmen are 18, which means that they were born … the year I was a college freshman.  Which means that I have t-shirts that are older than these kids.

Which also means that we’re not talking about a metaphorical generation gap, we’re talking about a literal generation gap, because I’m old enough to be their father.

That is, of course, if I could’ve ever gotten a “girl” to come back to my dorm room.