ah thanks for informing me about that

For me, the aging of Sims by the "day" reckoner works thusly:

Baby: born
Toddler: 1-2 years
Child: 5-6 years
Teenager: 13-14 years
Young Adult: 14+ (university is open to any teen/young adult SimHamptoner passing the SUET exam and meeting other criteria)
Adult: 20+ if student went to university, 27+ if they did not (I assume "teenager" in Sims 2 includes "developing adult in process of launching their life" for the sake of concise titling. Due to the way I play university, it takes 6-24 years to graduate, depending on how well the Sim studies)
Elder: 57+ (I assume "elder" simply means anyone too old to be able to convince a new company to hire them on a full-time basis, as they otherwise don't differ much from adults, the way I play them)
Death: 70+ (typical age is probably 80-90)

The + signs are because elixir comes into play from teenage years upwards, as do extra days gained by such things as going on holiday and absurdly long community lot visits.

I run a separate calendar for measuring neighbourhood plot progression. On that scale, no Sim has lived more than 6 years, and 4-5 is more typical for a Sim's complete lifespan. However, the amount of time it takes to complete a calendar length of time has varied a lot in the 16 years I've played Sims. All of this feels quite natural to me because to me Sims are their own species, so things that make no sense for a human can be perfectly realistic for a Sim.

That reminds me...I do have a rule in place where any teen who has an A+ grade and at least two other scholarships can choose to got to university early. They get any lost teen days added back once they've graduated, so if they skip off to college at halfway through their 12 day teen stage, they won't loose those 6 days but will have 6 days added to their adult stage (obviously once they've lived at least six days as an adult). I use the sim blender or sim manipulator to add/subtract days.

We (Americans) have kindergarten (5 years old), and some schools even have pre-school for 4 year olds. We also have pre-schools, or nursery schools, that parents pay for -they're are for kids under 5. They can be for 2 year-olds, with mommy; half-days, or full days; most parents who work pay for this type of child-care, because the kids are not just being "baby sat". And the best can be expensive. Montesory even is accredited for more grades.

When I was four, I was in some sort of Head Start-like program. I have zero memory of it, though, it's all second-hand memories. I actually started elementary school (it was called 'primary' rather than 'kindergarten') on my fifth birthday.

I can vaguely recall going to three preschools before attending kindergarten at nearly age 6. This was during the early 90's, so I'm not certain if the system then was a tad different than it is today, especially in Texas. Now one of the preschool locations is a Hindu church and another was at one of those temporary shacks on a school property. No clue what happened to the third place.

A little off-topic, I still remember the new Macintosh computers back when I was at kindergarten. Within recent years I've dreamed of what the computer lab would appear nowadays with newer Macs, although there would still be one or two of the 1992 computers present. Shoot, I even once dreamed that the single computer at the school library still had Carmen Sandiego installed. I assume the computer lab is still relying on Macintoshs, unless they switched to PC sometime later and now the children are learning Windows 7 or 10.

My elementary school had some old Macs - if my memory serves me right, this model specifically. It used At Ease and had a bunch of different things - I remember playing SimTown and a demo version of Widget Workshop that closed itself after fifteen minutes. There was also all the funny text-to-speech voices and I had fun making giant run-on sentences and having it play with the "Happy News" voice so it would sing it.

I just looked up what the Macs looked like back in 1992. Although there was the Macintosh Classic, I know my school's computer lab didn't have computers that compact. They were a closer resemblance of the Macs used in the first Jurassic Park movie, although those computers were probably newer.

I liked BO's Slow Aging Controller Mod that allows me to pick and choose who ages at what speed and even for those in the same household. I can have the adults age 3 times a week, the teens twice a week, the children once a week... or any combination there of.

Most times though I set each time to agin twice a week as that just doubles their life span and gives me more time to get to know each person in the house. Oh yeah, and it gives toddlers and kids more time to be such. No rushing to get the toddler potty trained, walking, and talking. Makes it less stressful on me to give them all their needed time to just be

Could it have been a Quadra?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra

I don't rightly recall what the computers in Jurassic Park looked like - though the weird flight simulator-like file manager actually was a real UNIX program, apparently.

My kids use Chrome Books at school, but until recently it was iPads.

Goodness, the way technology has evolved ever since I learned computers firsthand is extraordinary. That really makes me feel old.

I was gonna say kids nowadays wouldn't have a clue what computers were like nearly 30 years ago, but that'd be like I don't know how primitive the technology of television was like 30 years before I was born.

To pick up a previous point, technically crawling is not considered a milestone since not all babies ever do it.

My son was 16 months when he walked alone. I have heard if they do not walk by 18 months this is the time to get them checked out. But standing up while holding onto objects or adults' hands is a good sign that he'll get there soon enough. And two years for talking (single words).

I used to love the text-to-speech function on Macs! I had an iMac, with the coloured side panels when I started a graphic design course. It was the slowest thing and it didn't have internet because we didn't realise that we'd have to run a cable all the way up the stairs and when we figured that out, we decided not to bother. So I did some art stuff on it and some writing, but mainly used the family computer downstairs.

Interestingly for Maxis toddlers the shortcut used in file names is normally P. I think this stands for Preschooler. T is for teen. But they never included a preschool in the game. I'm glad though, because I like having my toddlers at home.

My first computer ran Windows 3.1. I feel old too.

My first computer didn't have a hard drive ... and yes it worked it was a Tandy 1000SX... lol. I had to use a boot disk to boot up dos to be able to then put in a program disk.

My first computer was an IBM Aptiva E series.

Mine was an Atari and didn't have a hard drive, either. I ran the word processor off a floppy and saved my work onto a different floppy. But they were 3 1/2 inch floppies, so I'm not really old. I remember some of the computer students at college using 5 1/2 inch floppies, and my husband learned to program on punch cards. He used to hold his programs together with rubber bands because it was such a pain if you dropped them and had to put them back together all in the right order.

I've also played Pong.

But of course grammapat wants to pat all our little heads now.

Mine was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80
I made it from a kit. :lovestruc

In my SimEarth box set, there's actually a card enclosed that you could mail in if you needed the 5-1/2 inch floppy disks. Occasionally I get tempted to mail it in to see what happens.

I also once saw an 8-inch floppy disk. Thing was pretty enormous!



There were also zip drives - basically very high-capacity (100 to 750 MB) floppy disks. But there was a pretty nasty problem with the Iomega brand, the click of death. That along with the fact that CD-Rs became a thing meant that they never really did much.

Although my first computer ran Windows 95, it was on a box that must've been at least five or ten years old in 1998. It was also designed to support other machines, which meant I couldn't plug in any other hardware besides a keyboard and a mouse. It couldn't even connect to the internet even if we had an internet service back then.

The sizes of those floppies is like looking at the various record sizes or even CD-roms (laser disc, anyone?).

I remember going to school way back when for my computer degree. I was learning languages like cobol, basic, and fortran. I remember when windows came out, and it was a big deal. I remember when a computer mouse was optional. I remember when we switched from the 5 and a 1/4 floppies to the 3 and a 1/2. I also remember the beginnings of the internet, and being on college boards way back when. and when 5 gb hard drives were immensely huge, and we wondered how we were every going to fill them. Yeah I am old. That was about 30 years ago.

LOL .. yeah I remember that too. My dad started with Netscape as he liked that better than the Windows, but MS soon overpowered the market and more or less squashed Netscape.
Ya know how FB tells ya you and so and so became friends X# of years ago, well week or so ago I had one that said she and I had become friends 8yrs ago. I had to laugh at that cuz it's been more like 18 years. I met her back when chat rooms where all the thing. I wasn't quiet 30 yet (2 years shy of it), but the Flirty 30's room in Lycos was where I went to chat. Oh yeah and then there was ICQ .... ahhh such memories ... :P

My first one was (I am old, Windows did not exist) - a Disk Operating System The letters were green on a black background. IBM.

I arrived at the office one morning and there were 2 boxes on my desk. My boss went and bought a pc for himself - and one for me. He said: The instructions are inside. Learn how to use it. We are going to do the financial statements on the pc.

So I did. It took me about 2 weeks to have all the financial statements on the pc (the program was LOTUS, I think) - and then I simply asked him to buy a word processing program in order to use the pc for typing letters as well. He agreed. The next day I asked for a better printer (and he agreed). I was heads over heels in love with the computer

I used Netscape up until it was discontinued in 2008. Switched to Mozilla Firefox then, but now the Firefox devs seems so dead-set upon it becoming a clone of Google Chrome that I just switched to Chrome.

I started using computers when I was 5 or 6. When I was 7, I managed to accidentally reinstall Windows on my mother's computer. I just put the installation disc in to see what would happen. I also disassembled a floppy disk to see if it was floppy inside. (As you can see, me doing things "just to see what would happen" is nothing new.)

Ahh, those were the days! I remember learning Fortran and BASIC, and also performing logic gate experiments on 8080 chips. Of course, I've forgotten it all now!


Lotus 1-2-3? I remember that too, making graphs from statistical data from a production line I was working on. It sounds like you were a quick learner!


Are you an engineer? The first thing I always did with a new toy or gadget was to take it apart to see how it worked (and also to see if I could make it work better). This is why my first computer was in kit form- no point in buying me the finished product if I was just going to reverse engineer it!

Until this thread I never really considered relating Sims ages to human ages, I always think of sims as being not human- so their lifespans and gestation bears no relation to ours. I sometimes play with ageing off though, just so I can get to know my sims better.