EXACTLY AS OLD

This website is an exercise in applied nerdiness. It tells you what happened to famous/important individuals on the exact age you now are. It also says what happened to people when they were exactly half of your age, or what they did when they were exactly twice your current age.

On a baseball message board a few years ago, a commentator noted that he was exactly as old as Babe Ruth was the day he died: exactly six months and 10 days after his 53rd birthday. I thought that was a neat thing to note, and figured it would be nice to figure it out in advance for other events – JFK’s assassination, Washington crossing the Delaware, Abe Vigoda the day Barney Miller debuted – whatever.

As it happens, I already had an Excel file with tons and tons of historical events and the date they occurred on. (I added to that sporadically over the years, as another nerdy hobby). Based on that, I could start looking up a bunch of this stuff without too much difficulty.

I started sharing things I had with people I knew on Facebook or on the original baseball message board, and most people really seemed to like it. A few suggested I try to create a website. Well, my brother does IT for a living, and I asked him if he could do it. This website is the result of my files and his computer know-how.

What is here is far from a finished product. As of now, there are about 10,000 as-old-as items in the database, and that’s only a small fraction of what I’d like to bring it up do. It’ll take years until it’s all done. But I can always share what I have for now.

I hope you like it.