If I'd ever owned a backpack, then I'd want an external framed one, I guess.

The stereo equipment discussion makes me a bit envious -- I did not have money for fancy stereo components back then, although my younger brother spent everything he had on sound equipment, it still wasn't much. I still have about all of it. I don't understand how you guys still have working speakers from back then, because my brother's crumbled into dust.

As for the age divide, truly it isn't so sharply defined. The (50 years old plus) guys in the guitar club at the office like both vintage and new guitars, and they also love the latest in pocket-sized consumer electronics. Well, we work in I/T, after all. Two of the high school-aged boys who are friends of my daughter have a wall-full of vintage stereo equipment.

As for a generation of morons who can't read or write, it's partially true. My eighteen-year-old son reports that his first college language arts class "went all sixth-grade on us", and the students corrected each other's essays. The essay my son corrected was full of the simplest grammatical errors. My son's paper was focused on the topic and coherent, and he received a grade of 90%, while the other student got a 0. He wondered how anyone who couldn't write a sentence could even get into college. But I encountered the same situation when I was in college 35 years ago myself.

As my dad told me repeatedly, it takes all kinds to make a world.