That Granny? Probably way cooler than you.

You gonna let an eighty-year-old granny beat you?

I’ve heard comments like this a lot lately. And it’s funny, right? Conjures up images of a dotty old woman on her rocker, watching The Price is Right, and knitting but not being much good for anything else. Even the thought of being beaten by her would embarrass a young person. Great way to motivate, huh? Hmmmmm…

A granny in her seventies or eighties now would have been in her teens or twenties in the 1960's. Some of eighties-up folks were Silent Generation but many of them were vanguard Boomers. Making love, not war. Sleeping rough, dancing barefoot, groovin’ to rock and roll, and marching for change. They were hippies, man. It was the Civil Rights Movement and Boomers were flexing their muscles for the first time. These people sang, smoked pot, and above all, enjoyed themselves. Honestly, that granny was probably way cooler than you.

People who are in their eighties laid the groundwork for our current technology and trained the computer geniuses who built tech you use every day. Bill Gates, the daddy of all things Microsoft is 66 years old. Steve Jobs would have been 67 in February. Steve Wozniak is 71 years old. But they didn’t develop their amazing tech in a vacuum.

And an eighty-something grandmother could have been into computers. In the sixties, many women were programmers though they didn’t get paid as much as men. Marketing and sexism slowly edged women out of computing and programming by the 80’s — and boy did the marketing work. Still, today, women only make up about five percent of working developers worldwide.

That doesn’t mean women aren’t able to do the work, though. I’ve just turned 60 and I loved computers when I was a child — way back when you had to program on cards and wait a day for your program to run and come back with your results. Yes, really.

I headed down a creative path and yet I wrote my first website in 1996. So, I was, by no means, an Internet pioneer but definitely an early adopter. I did a website update in ’99 which got archived and you can see it pictured here from a screencap from the Wayback Machine. And in ’99, I was already working remotely on the internet — years before it became a thing.