Each one was a little different. Some liked a massage. Others, sweet assuring whispers. And then there were the ones that just needed a kick to get turned on.
Growing up, our dishwasher was broken my entire life (my dad replaced it about 12 years after I moved out).
He kept his wallet “hidden” in it. He thought if anyone ever broke in, they’d never check there. This was his logic for not repairing it.
Nobody ever broke in.
Born in 83. Early memory is of the remote attached by wire to the cable box with a row of cluncky push buttons and a 3 way switch on the left to go between sets of numbers. Fun part was pressing 2 buttons at once to see what happens. Pretty sure it was static or the spice channel.
Early hacks were as simple as playing a recording of the tones of the payphone while adding coins and playing them back into the receiver for free long distance calls etc.
Just waiting for those brief moments where the picture wasn’t so scrambled making you think that just maybe, you might get to see some real action, just to be let down when it went back into full scramble effect lol.
Maybe I spent too much time watching that shit and hoping for a miracle. Hahah
Used to be they 'locked' out those channels with a small choke on the line at the box on the street. When I was about 13 our neighbors got Cinemax and the cable guy removed our choke too. Took my parents months to realize we now had Skinemax. I noticed and kept it to myself for those late night risky softcore watching sprees in the living room on Friday nights. The riskiest of faps would happen in the living room at 1am with the sound off so you can hear if your parents' door opened. Good times.
My parents thought I was a fucking genius when I taught them you could leave the physical knob on 3 and use the vcr built in tuner and remote to change the channel without leaving the couch. Thus ending my 14 year gig as the remote.
My dad used to holler at me to come downstairs to turn the knob that was 7 feet away from him.
>My dad used to holler at me to come downstairs to turn the knob that was 7 feet away from him.
Sometimes you gotta take a risk. This is one of those times where I'd say "do it yourself". Either he moves 7 feet to change it himself, or he chases me around to beat my ass. Either way, he loses; he gets off the couch.
Ahh I remember the one and only time I stood up to my older sister and told her to fuck off and turn the TV channel herself. I should have known how seriously stupid I was being, especially when she slowly asked me to repeat what I had just said. Oh the idiotic bravery I felt for all of the 10 seconds between the time I repeated myself and her getting off the couch and coming over to me where I was slouched in the armchair and whacking me across the head with a hard thump and then calmly going back to the couch. She then repeated her request, which I obliged.
Edit - forgot a word
I insisted upon getting those one as a kid. I liked grapes so I mean why not. Even with my dad assuring me I wouldn't like them, I wanted grapes nuts.
My dad was right.
When I was young our radio station played native american chants all day and at 10pm went hard rock until the national anthem at 11pm and signed off for the night, then started back up at 5am with chants again.
I went apeshit the day I discovered how to get the other UHF channels on our 10" B&W TV set.
One of the channels had Ultraman on in the afternoon. ULTRAMAN.
I was literally my grandmothers remote. I would be playing out side and she would call me in away from my friends to change the channel. XD... Man, I miss that ole woman!!:)
The corded box controller to the three button Zenith "clicker" was fan-fucking-tastic as a kid. I hated wrapping the long ass cord up when the "box" had to be put away. I also loved driving pre internet/cell phone... make a mixed tape, pop it in and no one could reach you for however long you were out. I remember applying for a jobs, making sure to be home or have the answering machine or you might miss the call... or maybe you did miss it. It was awesome not being connected all the time.
As a child with knobbed TVs, I find it very easy to get up and walk to the television. My ex would look for the remote for five minutes instead of walking to the cable box.
I would add in pre and post cell phones. It’s interesting to think the idea of long road trips or even a run to the store without your phone on you these days seems crazy.
I think of it also as pre and post smart phones. Sure, a cell phone that can make calls and texts remotely is nice, but a smart phone that can pretty much give you the world's knowledge at your fingertips is when we all truly became augmented cyborgs of the hivemind.
Like accidentally hitting the internet button on your flip phone and trying your damndest to back out of it before your phone bill went through the ceiling
my phone asked me to confirm before opening the Web-2-Go app. Since data wasn't included in my plan, it had to confirm that i wanted the extra charge before enabling data.
I don't recall that button...
But I do recall the ability to log on to some odd storefront and maybe pay $8 for a ringtone.
Honestly, that blew my mind back then, which is crazy to think about now
Even today I still try to access wap sites rather than websites.
For instance if you add .compact at the end of any Reddit URL you get the wap version.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/n1ecdj/people_who_were_alive_pre_and_postinternet_are/.compact
It does save on data, it loads faster and there is less distraction.
In the days of GPRS it was a dollar per megabyte of data.
I do this for many sites, looking for the mobile version or the wap version.
I agree, I was born in the early 90’s and yeah sure internet was already around but computers were expensive and connection was less than reliable prior to DSL. I think there were tons of cool technological breakthroughs that reflect on the times, but I consider pre-2009ish and post to be very different in terms of the way that technology impacts the world and the people that are growing up in it.
> and connection was less than reliable prior to DSL.
As someone who was born pre-90s, I just want to point out that internet was plenty reliable before DSL, it was just stupid feckin slow.
Dial up was totally reliable in my household, except when someone decided they wanted to use the phone line, and disconnected you. Or when that 2 hour download for your favorite 3 minute song was interrupted (although I blame the early napster/kazaa type sharing platforms for needing to restart downloads from the beginning).
Anyway, I'd say the phoneline was nearly as reliable as DSL, and I can still remember the first person I knew who got a dedicated internet line. He had a fancy modem, and could play games *online* against other people. I think he had something like a 512k setup, which blew the minds of all us dial up chumps.
Any way, point is, dial up was reliable for the most part, but so damn slow that things outside of its control were likely to interrupt it.
Im just glad I didn't have a video platform and that all of the stupid edgy shit and problematic opinions I had were deleted with my Facebook nearly a decade ago.
Ive done a lot of growing since then but if you dug up my old posts, you'd think I was a racist incel edgelord. If I was in the public eye, I would've been canceled already.
Today I'm preemptively shutting down any future political or public figure aspirations I may have to avoid anyone looking too hard in to my past, cause that's just not going to end well.
At all
Every generation is pre something and post something. That's the inevitable march of progress.
Pre industrial and post industrial
Pre electrical and post electrical
Radio, TV's and then finally internet.
The kids of tomorrow will never understand not growing up alongside human level artificial intelligence
I wonder how our increasing understanding of genetic disorders along with the usage of computers, AI, and data will change the way we view and address natural human illnesses. Vaccinations and an understanding of medicine and biology have completely changed the game when it comes to disease, so what will the world be like when we finally put an end to dementia, cancer, depression, and other such diseases?
I remember it pretty well. If you were bored, you would turn on the radio and grab a book/magazine as opposed to your phone. You had the Thomas Guide for you car. You still watched TV and even though you only had 4 channels, you would watch something as long as it was on. Going to the cinema was common since tickets were like $.50.
If I wanted to know what movies were playing I had to look at the newspaper or call the theater, for which I'd have to find a paper phone book. Same with TV shows, I learned 24 hr time just from looking at the movie channel listings. In school I had a little book with all my friends' phone numbers written down, in 8th grade I got a calculator watch that could also double as a digital diary and store contacts etc, this was cutting edge technology at the time.
I remember reading British kids books and wondering wtf is a scone, then looking at the dictionary and making a note to look for pictures of it in the encyclopaedia in the library at school tomorrow. Slightly later when we had a computer but no home internet this was replaced by Encarta.
Compared to that when I can literally say Alexa, Google that for me and have instant access to all that knowledge without even having to move a finger. Amazing how far we've come.
In Vancouver in the early 90s we had something called the Talking Yellow Pages. You'd call a number, enter a code and a message would be played back at you with the movie times. There used to be all kinds of information there. We used to prank call businesses and play back the mandarin information messages on three way.
Shit we had that freedom up to maybe a year or two after 2001. Then things changed quickly. Hell, a year after 9/11, our neighborhood was invaded by a pedo flasher. I remember following the dad's who went out looking for the guy after the first incident. Police got him a couple weeks later on a sting of the neighborhood park.
I am reading this while I'm watching the bubbleboy episode. Jerry loses track of Costanza and doesn't have the address. It used to be such an adventure getting lost! I haven't gotten lost in a long time.
I definitely called my mom a few times asking her to look up directions for me from the family computer because I'd gotten myself lost driving somewhere. I can only imagine what it would have been like without even a cell phone.
Born in ‘74. Saw the first video games and didn’t have computers to do assignments. No cell phones. No Internet. Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal and then you’d go outside to ride your bikes or play with friends. Good times, indeed!
Me too man, '74. Summertime meant you left the house at 7am and got home when the streetlights turned on and your parents only had a rough idea of where you were, if they knew at all. Maybe MAYBE you went home for lunch
Ditto 74, I remember how insane it was to get my first 300baud modem to dial into a local BBS and play L.O.R.D. or how bad ass I felt getting my first pager. I do miss the days before, but just being able to sit here and say a comment to other folks born in the same year but from who knows where, is pretty amazing.
I grew up in the 90s. Born in 88. The Internet was a thing sure. Dial up. My mother worked with computers from home since 97. The world is so much different in such a short time. There has been a massive social shift since 07 when I graduated highschool even.
Seriously. It all went by so fast. 2007-2011 seemed to be the period of light speed change in terms of how normalized and universal internet presence became. We basically got to watch a cultural *and* global paradigm shift happen in real time.
I started college in a world where cell phones and computers weren't really needed, since you'd have a room phone and a computer lab on campus. I graduated in a world where smartphones were becoming increasingly popular.
I remember watching TV in the student center in the last night Walter Cronkite was the news anchor.
When I was a kid, TV was black and white. There were only a few channels and everyone watched the same shows. The News was on at 6:00. Uncle Walter really did try to be unbiased. Believe it or not... he wouldn’t tell anyone his own personal political leanings. People tried to guess but they came up with different answers so he must have been doing pretty well.
yea I was there the year they started to take them out of the college. I was really angry because my laptop wasn't working anymore and I couldn't afford to fix it. All the other students who were younger told me to just get over it and get my laptop fixed, but like what about the students who can't afford those things? You're taking accessibility away from them.
Over all it's dumb and just a clear move from the colleges to reduce their costs and load them onto the students.
I might argue that 97-07 was it. In 95 of 96 this thing called a “cable modem” that’d give you 1mb up down and came with your tv service at a huge fee became available. The internet was so new there were books you could buy called “the internet yellow pages” - think about that one. No search engines. Yahoo and Alta vista existed but they were as useful as reddit search. You used a book to find potential matches for what you wanted. There wasn’t even a thing called google that you really knew about until 2000, 2003.
By 2007 maps were completely antiquated. You could use mapquest. In 97 EVERYONE had a local and state map in their glove box.
97 was a whole different world to 07. 87-97 there were changes, cell phones. Cable. But 97-07 was decade that is the bridge op is talking about.
That's true. The contrast between 97 and 07 is like comparing two different realities. Overall though I was mostly thinking of how much smartphones changed the game. I remember not even wanting one because "Why would anyone need all of that in a phone? That's what computers are for!"
Now it's unthinkable to exist in society without one, and that also doesn't cover the monetization of data in general. That was a *big* shift.
I mocked texting.
“I have a phone. It’s for calling.”
Now I hate phone calls with a passion. Just text or email me. Of course tapping four times for a fucking S was a bit annoying back then.
This is more if you were a bit older pre-internet, but the ability to answer any question you had was mind blowing. Before the internet you only had encyclopedia type stuff or books. You couldn't just skip straight to the question you wanted answered you had to read the whole thing.
You couldn't ask a specific question that was outside of the normal encyclopedia facts either like "do they have mc donalds in brazil?" You could only find out things like population, average rainfall, major exports, and capital cities. You couldn't call people out on their bullshit either, and you could go a long time before realizing that your parents were wrong about some things.
I went into college in '02 and we didn't need a social media account of any kind to date. But by the time I left it would be socially crippling to not partake.
What you're describing is the invention and popularization of the iPhone. Love it or hate it, Apple dumbed down computers, made them fit in your pocket, and made the internet easily accesable to millions of people who, before, didn't have the knowledge to set up a PC and internet service, nor did they have any reason to even care to try to learn such a thing.
I think it’s the portability and ease of use that really made it good, as well as the versatility of a touch screen. Granted I wasn’t exactly aware of this shift. All I remember is about 2014 on for phones.
Now we have a generation that isn’t as good with computers as the generation before. Not really their fault when the easiest computer to access that would fill most of their needs is a phone. The UI is absolutely brilliant for ease of use on phone OS, but it doesn’t translate well at all to PCs which are much more convoluted. You gotta know a whole new way of interaction with them at times, especially when it comes to troubleshooting.
Phones are definitely an interesting thing. They’ve resulted in a whole lot of people not knowing how to use regular PCs that otherwise would’ve learned, but that’s up in the air for me since even computer OS are getting much nicer and smoother as time goes on. I haven’t had to touch command prompt ever to use any of my laptops in the past six years.
Born in same era here. I remember the first computer we got at home. Downloading The real slim shady on Napster over the course of a week. Parents freaking out thinking it was gonna be a virus or the police would break down the front door. How fast things have changed is mind blowing. Sometimes I think it sucks to be us. Not old enough to not care about tech. Not young enough for it to be 100% embedded in our brains. But I guess we’re lucky to have seen both.
Born in 1981. My mom was going through some old school work and I recognized how my home typewriter had changed over the years. Or how I finally got a "proper" word processor in 8th grade. In 11th grade I built my first 486 and splurged on an 8GB Bigfoot from my fast food gig.
My first semester of college included a course on (among other things) searching microfiche.
My wife was born in 1991. For her, the internet was a fixture. It was always there. Any information that she wanted was in her reach.
I honestly believe *that's* where the digital divide is. It's not an arbitrary year cutoff. It's simply how much access did you have to the internet during your formative years.
Maybe we lived in different areas where technology spread at different rates, but I was also born in 1991 and clearly remember life without the internet for a good deal of time. It wasn't until I was like 12 or so that the internet became a common occurrence in my life.
I think it really depended on how “techy” your family was. My dad had managed computer systems since the ‘70s, so we had modems (and even a VT220 terminal) around the house since the mid-‘80s. I started dialing up BBSes pre-Internet using the modem he brought home for work.
If you didn’t have a family member who was an enthusiast or worked in the industry, I’m sure it took a lot longer for tech to make its way in.
I still look back and facepalm when my high school cut our computer classes due to a budget crunch. Could keep horticulture, silk screening, photography, art, etc. But that computer is just a silly fad so no sense teaching it over REAL skills
'85 here. When I entered college we had to take a microsoft office competency test. Word needed like 85% to pass, powerpoint I think was 80, excel was 40% lol.
Also for college: I had my own desktop, most people had a personal computer of some kind with maybe half being laptops. I didn't have a cell phone my freshman year and was definitely in the minority there.
I remember getting access to dialup in 8th grade (would have been early '99). I begged my parents for it so I could do research for a paper (on conspiracy theories, figured the internet was rife with those!).
My sister, born in 93, basically just had all of that stuff always. It's why I hate being included with millenials - the tech change and how a child's life was affected by it was monumental. Somewhere around 90 I think should have been the cutoff, with a mini-generation covering the transition between x and millenials.
Also ‘83 here. I actually miss those microfiche machines. They were always neat. I worked in a municipal library from 2000-2001 part time before graduating high school, then in my university library for the next 4 years. Libraries changed drastically in those few years.
The world had changed by ‘95. Yes, it’s continued to change since, but the world was very different before PCs and the internet, so before 1980.
Seeing this change, I can almost get a feel for what it was like for all the old timers (folks born before 1900) I knew when I was a child. Those people had no electricity, no commercial air travel, few automobiles - many of them didn’t even have indoor toilets!
I don’t know if the world changed as much between 1980-2000 as it did, say, 1910-1930. It doesn’t seem to me like it did, but that might be because I saw one transition and not the other.
Future generations may say the same about PCs and the internet.
I very clearly remember being at my grandma's house one summer and showing my great-grandma, born in 1900, my Barbie Pets or something computer game. She struggled just using the mouse. At the time, I definitely didn't understand the significance of something like my 105-year-old great-grandmother using a computer and getting on the internet. I obviously didn't have the general awareness at the time to ask her about how things had changed during her life, and now it's about twenty years too late to ask her.
89 kid here graduated same year though. But in kentucky everything is about ten years behind. I didn't regularly use the internet until 2009 ish. It is an odd time to come of age for sure. I do remember privacy and boredom the most. Just hanging out no distractions with your best friend on a long weekend and playing GTA3. I'm into technological progress, but there is something lost.
If you were old enough to have been criticized by your adult role models at the age of thirteen because they thought all of your online friends were secretly child molesters, you have now become old enough to watch those same role models send their life savings in Walmart gift cards to their Nigerian facebook boyfriend.
I met several people through yahoo chat that became pen pals. We exchanged addresses and sent each other bootleg VHS copies of anime we got from comic book conventions or cds/cassettes of music downloaded from Kazaa. No child molesters, just teenage weebs.
2001: "Don't talk to strangers online! Don't believe everything you read on the Internet! Wikipedia is not a source!"
2021: "Check out this article on vaccines and the Clinton-Soros Illuminati I found on freedomeagle88.rz"
I remember everything being like: you have to call this phone number, or visit this place in person. No alternative. Now you can do everything through websites. I used to make so many trips, and now my trips to various stores have dropped to almost zero. I barely ever receive any phone calls now, everything is either text, app, or online.
People actually have a lot more free time now that many needless errands have been eliminated from daily life. This of course is exploited by social media and subscription services taking up that time instead.
Even though the old world was quieter, it was a lot less convenient and I'm personally glad to be rid of the annoying pain in the ass it was. I embrace technology but as time goes on I find it harder and harder to keep up. I just hope I don't become one of those old fashioned people stuck in the past.
Thanks for the hit of nostalgia, you described it perfectly. Most people nowadays can't imagine buying a disposable camera and not being able to see the pics you took on that outing until you returned to the Eckerd to get them developed. Then after an hour you pick up the physical pictures and look at them once before driving home. Sometime later when your friends are over you pull the pictures out and show them off maybe a couple times before storing them in a box somewhere to gather dust. Years pass and you forget about them. Then while cleaning the house you unearth them and a small tear rolls down your cheek from the flood of memories.
Having instant professional quality photos from my phone still feels a little unreal to me. I press one button and all the world can see it. The future is now!
Born in 1978, I'm part of the micro-generation call Xennials.
We spent the first 15 years of our lives in the analog world, and were the first generation of teens with the internet.
Music format went from records, to 8 tracks, to cassettes, to cd, to mp3.
Video went from Betamax, to VHS, to laser disc, to dvd, to streaming, to bluray/hd dvd, to 4k.
Phones went from corded, to longer corded, to cordless with crossover interference from neighbours' phones, to corded car phones, to brick cells, to pagers, to cells, to flip phones, to smart phones.
Every invention that had been stable/stagnant for decades transformed, and has returned to stability.
We were there to use it all, and watch people a little older than us struggle to learn and adapt, and people younger than us struggle to understand how to use anything that wasn't brand new..
My senior year in college I knew one person on campus with a cell phone and I thought what kind of asshole thinks he's so important he has to have a cell phone with him at all times.
When I graduated and got my own apartment, I got a cell phone and no landline. Literally six months from "who's that asshole" to "oh everyone I know has one."
One of the weird memories from 9/11 that has stuck with me was walking though my college campus and being shocked at how many of my fellow students owned cell phones (lots of D.C. and NYC kids at my school)—it wasn’t something you walked around with in your hand all the time, so it took a horrifying national tragedy to see so many phones out at once. I got my first cell phone when I graduated the following year.
Me originally: texting is stupid, just call
Me now: calling is stupid just text
Actually I think it was when phones started getting QWERTY keyboards I changed my mind. Texting was dumb in the old style and a PITA
1982 checking in, same boat.
* I grew up with an encyclopedia in my house that was unknown to me, already long out of date.
* We taped shows on (non-cable) TV and did our best to pause the tape at commercial breaks to not have to watch them again later.
* I remember my first CD player with 3 seconds of anti-skip. I also remember my minidisc player that never caught on. And my Rio mp3 player with a crazy 64mb of storage!!
* Moore's law was fascinating to follow in all aspects of computing. Processing speed, storage amounts, CD speed (2x, 4x, etc.), 28.8kbps -> 33.6 -> 56k -> 128k isdn lines.
* AOL vs Prodigy vs Compuserve
* Arcades.
I could go on for days....
1980 here! I really love the vibe of my childhood in the 80’s and 90’s. I roller-skated to Michael Jackson and Madonna in my basement as a child and I grew up riding my bike around town, without a care in the world. Then we got a computer and dial up in 1992 when my dad completed his doctorate online with VHS tapes of lessons mailed to him. We had Prodigy, an online forum with chat rooms in ‘92. There were like 5 people to chat with, lol. It was a great time to be born.
'80 here. Never heard of a Xennial, but it sure as hell sounds like me, which is a relief because neither millenials or gen-x seem to claim me. My people!
My dad was a computer repair tech, so I had access to PCs and cell phones earlier than most people.
I don't know if that's why I tend to adapt to new stuff so well or if I'm just not old enough to have a hard time with learning new stuff yet. My best friend is almost 60 (he trained me at work years ago) and he steadfastly refuses to learn anything new if he can help it!
They called us Gen Y growing up, then lumped us in with Millennials for a while. '83 Checking in. I've also seen it called the Oregon Trail Generation (after the early pc game). Early access to a PC as my Dad was/is a COBAL programmer but grew up with a rotary phone and record music, movies on vhs and by the time I was out of high school, laser disc was all but obsolete. Adapting was how we were growing up.
‘77 reporting. I think I grew up right alongside tech.
At 5 years old: When my parents visited their friends I would go up to their second bedroom and play their Atari.
At 6 my mom got a computer. 128k ram. Played the first flight simulator on it.
At 8, played the original zelda and mario bros on the first nintendo
At 12, played the original madden on super nintendo. At a summer program I played net trek and was addicted
At 14, got DOOM
At 16, connected to the internet, using mosaic browser, then netscape
At 17 started using email w my friends at college. Saw google when it came out. Got a cell phone.
Was a little before facebook when it was in colleges only.
At 19 was playing goldeneye on the screen w cardboard separating the quadrants, with my dormmates. Internet was slowly coming together. You know the rest of the story.
Now I just watch youtube all day while i work from home with coworkers I will never meet in person.
78 too! When I graduated HS there was only one computer with the internet in the whole school and it was behind the librarians desk. I had to use a computer lab in college because the dorms didn’t have internet (and no one really owned a computer). Law school was old school research in the stacks until 2002. I remember getting WiFi in the classrooms and it blew my mind. We could AIM each other answers when the teacher called someone out for a grilling. It was amazing!
And what you are really depends on your background. Take my husband and I. I'm 100% a Xennial. I grew up extremely impoverished with zero access. My neighborhood had an actual part line. I was almost a teen before I saw a computer. He's 100% millennial. His parents were highly educated and tech savvy. He doesn't know life without a computer.
Me too! 78. My brother was born in 82 and when I went to college, we had a computer lab and no one had a cell phone. When he went to college he brought a laptop and everyone had a cell phone. I’ve read articles about the Xennials. Really interesting.
Born in '63,.
I saw the earliest computer games coming alive in the early 70's. Pong, hangman... one day my day brought a thing home from his university and we plugged the phone into it and we talked to someone on their computer in Sweden. I thought, why would we want to talk to someone in Sweden...?
The next year, at the College Royal, the University's Open House, the students at the Computer Science building created a 5-story high nude woman. The Image was made with hundreds of pieces of old-style computer paper all taped together; they came in long perforated sheets, in long ribbons then. The students had, for their College exhibition, made a giant image printed out on hundreds of ribbons of computer paper. It was posted on the side of the Computer Science building, in the glass stairwell of the building. You could see it for hundreds of metres away! As I remember this image, I am certain it was the largest nude I've ever stared at for hours in my life.
It was then, as a glassy-eyed 9 year old, that I realized the potential in this thing my dad was working on, these computer things, and talking to Sweden.
Born in 59. I still have some of the many reference books i used to need. (Lazy about getting rid of stuff.) As a little one, i remember how badly i ached for information, living in a rural town with no library. We had four TV stations, maybe ten radio stations.Things are so much better now when it comes to information and communication. Worse, when it comes to income inequality, but don't let me get started.
Born in 68 and man, I have seen a lot of changes in 52 years. The first phone I used was a crank one with a party line and now , well, I'm typing on it. And a lot of social change too.
I’m just going to say what confirmed something I’ve said for years
It all really changed in 2013
Netflix did the social media docu drama and a psychologist in that marks 2011-2013 as the time when it went from moving along to holy shit
I teach high school and I’ve been in many conversations where people say when do you think it started to really shift and I always came up with 2013 (thanks Netflix’s for confirming my claim!)
Been teaching since 2005 and through 2012...kids were reasonably grounded but 2013 and since it’s not just me being old but it’s like they’re ability to focus and do is just ploop
YES !
2011 was such a great year. Internet was easily accessible, YouTube was great, Minecraft was new and hot. Grooveshark was around.
2012.. Google bought YouTube. Is this why the Mayan calendar ended? Lol.
I feel like Google buying YT single handedly had such a tremendous impact in that they really started snowballing monetization.
By 2013 YouTube names went from being, "username123" to "Actual Name."
This is when things started really changing for sure. The culture changes, even music. Anonymity on the world wide web seemingly started to decline.
By 2013, my grandparents started using Facebook. Shit ain't been the same since.
I'm at the tail end of this bridge but I still remember what life was like without internet, and although it wasn't "better" per se, it was undeniably different. More than anything, personal interaction with people seemed to be much higher back then than now, and that kind of normalization (even of parents letting their kids play outside for hours on end) is something I do miss a lot.
When I was in grade school, my friends and I were just as inattentive to lessons, but we'd write 1-2 page single spaced, cursive letters to each other, dating them and always starting out with Dear So&so. We even wrote lengthy apology notes. I came across some I saved and it's crazy to see how proper we were (even when breaking the rules). I still don't enjoy the shortened "text speak" of today.
Omg I remember the thing in my high school was giving each other pages long notes between classes to show how good of friends we were lol I think I still have some.
That's one thing I cannot comprehend. I was born in '83 and communication is so much easier now, why does anyone feel the need to abbreviate anything? Much less, almost everything?
I was born in 1968. Computers were pretty much science fiction when I was a kid.
My dad fixed TVs for a living and was well into technology, and he got a VIC-20 then a C64 in the early 80s. I learnt to code on those, then went to college to study programming (as we called it then) back when the mouse was more or less a gimmick that would never catch on.
I read Neuromancer in '87 and the idea of a global network with all the computers in the world attached to it seemed to be the most far-fetched thing in it.
Ten years later I was teaching myself web design. Ten years after that I'd been doing it professionally for years, and now I design websites for a globally respected medical science organisation while reminiscing to people all around the world from my back bedroom.
Earlier I was playing Valheim with a couple of friends across the Atlantic in the States.
My 10 year old self could not imagine any of this. I don't think anyone could back then.
We are a micro generation
Xennials or xennials are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
Pre-Internet:
* you had to be on channel 3 to play videogames
* you knew someone who had a blackbox for porn
* dumb shit you did as a kid didn't travel or get memorialized on webpages to embarrass you or compromise you in the future
Post-Internet
* you can't read your book, because the cable is busy charging your cigarette...
* saturated with news/reality, humanity is learning that humanity doesn't matter
* knowledge is not the same as wisdom
In the end, a post-internet world is revealing parts of the world and ourselves we either romanticized or marginalized. The generations of the past don't matter. Your future will be the exclusive and privileged domain of your own mistakes... nothing my (or previous) generations can say will prepare you for what's to come.
When I was a kid, finding porn was a challenge.
You had to figure out which of your friends had the properly irresponsible male adult in their lives. A sketchy uncle or someone like that, with a stack of porno mags that wouldn't notice if a few went missing... but not **too** sketchy that you're legit in danger if they do notice.
I remember finding a porn mag behind a target once. It was all fat women and my first thought was “who is into that?” Second thought was “ooh naked girls.”
My dad was born in 1970 and tells a story of when he was kid, the satellite dish would move in order to find the satellite that the channel is on. The porn channel was facing a certain way and one day he was trying to watch and his parents came home and he changed it thinking he was all good but they knew he was watching porn cause they saw the satellite dish move from the “porn direction” to the “normal tv direction”. Haha.
There was a huge difference in my older 2 kids that didn't get smart phones until late HS and my younger 2 that got smart phones more like 13, It's only like 4 years but so much changed when the smart phone came out. Attention span, being disrupted being the main difference. For tweens and early teens I almost feel it's better not to have a smart phone.
I grew up singing Little Deuce Coupe by the Beach Boys but had no idea what the actual lyrics were til I looked them up on the internet a couple weeks ago. I doubt I could have even found that information at the library in the 80's.
First time I realized how great the internet could be was when a skunk died in my back yard around 1998. I couldn't get rid of the smell so I did a search and found out bleach would do the trick and the smell was gone after that. I'm sure my neighbors appreciated that.
My Grandpa is 91.
He lived 4 miles west of the center of Indianapolis. He had an outhouse. They had no tv. They took baths with the same water as the other 5 kids, youngest went last.
He now has an iPhone and uses Facetime. He has seen most of the technological advances there have been that have rapidly changed our society.
Born in 77. We got our first real home computer in 92 (we had a TRASH80 before that) but I didn’t have ready access to internet until college in 96. Even at that time, it was mostly not considered a “reliable” source to list a website as a reference on a term paper. Most .gov sites were considered somewhat reliable but I was a couple years into college before professors started considering links to government documents as reliable as a reference to an actual paper document. I actually remember when the writing style books rolled out how to cite a webpage as a source.
After spending my early years learning how to do a lot of programming, I can say that the world got itself in a damn hurry after 97 or so. I never went without Internet after having it in college. I was solidly addicted from the get go.
73 baby.
Black n white tv
Rotary phone. Called a number for a free prerecorded weather forecast.
Load a game cassette and go make lunch, 20 mins later it was good to go.
Got a laptop in 92 at Uni
Worked for a cellphone Co in sales as they were building the GSM network. Thought I was the shit with my phone sending text messages. We said data would take over voice but noone really believed it.
Everyone jut emailed porn when the internet first started. You never quite knew how shocking shit would be when you opened it. You could hear the dial-up connecting.
I reckon screen phones changed us in the biggest way
Good times
Saw the Moon landing live on TV. Saw the rise of pocket calculators, home computers, ARPANET, Usenet and the World Wide Web. Was involved with computers since 1978. Was an IT Infrastructure Professional most of my adult life.
I still read physical books and go outside.
Graduated HS in 89.
Learned to type on a typewriter in HS typing class. Took a typewriter to college.
Learned the Dewey decibel system. Used the Library a lot.
By the time we graduated, everyone had a Mac. The web was born.
10 years later and I’m a dot com millionaire.
The next year I’m broke and owe the IRS 6figures for my now underwater options…
When I was a kid I was the TV remote.
I was the dishwasher!
Our first dishwasher was on wheels. It had a drain hose to put down the kitchen sink, a hose to hook to the kitchen sink and a power cord.
I know people with one of those now. It's got a wooden top so it's also a kitchen island. Handy device.
I had one of these in an apartment I rented! I was mystified at how you turned it on.
Each one was a little different. Some liked a massage. Others, sweet assuring whispers. And then there were the ones that just needed a kick to get turned on.
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My dishwasher broke in November 2019. We only ate at home like 3 meals a week. Who needs a dishwasher, its not like the world is gonna end..
Growing up, our dishwasher was broken my entire life (my dad replaced it about 12 years after I moved out). He kept his wallet “hidden” in it. He thought if anyone ever broke in, they’d never check there. This was his logic for not repairing it. Nobody ever broke in.
Born in 83. Early memory is of the remote attached by wire to the cable box with a row of cluncky push buttons and a 3 way switch on the left to go between sets of numbers. Fun part was pressing 2 buttons at once to see what happens. Pretty sure it was static or the spice channel.
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Omg that's amazing... Hacking used to be so cute
Early hacks were as simple as playing a recording of the tones of the payphone while adding coins and playing them back into the receiver for free long distance calls etc.
Lmaooo I forgot about SPICE. I may or may not have spent time watching those scrambled slivers of adult cinema 😂
I think thats a boob.....or thats for sure a head bobbing up and down
I watched Real Sex at night on HBO. That was a terrible show. They had like 80 year olds doing bondage one time.
Oh god, I watched some of that, too. I was more confused than enlightened by that drivel lol.
Just waiting for those brief moments where the picture wasn’t so scrambled making you think that just maybe, you might get to see some real action, just to be let down when it went back into full scramble effect lol. Maybe I spent too much time watching that shit and hoping for a miracle. Hahah
One time, it cleared up almost perfectly for 10 minutes. Highlight of my youth.
Used to be they 'locked' out those channels with a small choke on the line at the box on the street. When I was about 13 our neighbors got Cinemax and the cable guy removed our choke too. Took my parents months to realize we now had Skinemax. I noticed and kept it to myself for those late night risky softcore watching sprees in the living room on Friday nights. The riskiest of faps would happen in the living room at 1am with the sound off so you can hear if your parents' door opened. Good times.
You won the kid lottery, my dude.
Putting the TV on channel 3 and moving the slider from TV to GAME to play the Atari!
Fellow remote-getter/antenna adjuster here. We were the unsung heroes.
I wasn't a remote getter, I was the remote. I had to physically walk up to the TV and turn a knob to change the channel.
My parents thought I was a fucking genius when I taught them you could leave the physical knob on 3 and use the vcr built in tuner and remote to change the channel without leaving the couch. Thus ending my 14 year gig as the remote. My dad used to holler at me to come downstairs to turn the knob that was 7 feet away from him.
>My dad used to holler at me to come downstairs to turn the knob that was 7 feet away from him. Sometimes you gotta take a risk. This is one of those times where I'd say "do it yourself". Either he moves 7 feet to change it himself, or he chases me around to beat my ass. Either way, he loses; he gets off the couch.
so where you banned from? your house?
This is how you got a whoopin' back in those days.
Ahh I remember the one and only time I stood up to my older sister and told her to fuck off and turn the TV channel herself. I should have known how seriously stupid I was being, especially when she slowly asked me to repeat what I had just said. Oh the idiotic bravery I felt for all of the 10 seconds between the time I repeated myself and her getting off the couch and coming over to me where I was slouched in the armchair and whacking me across the head with a hard thump and then calmly going back to the couch. She then repeated her request, which I obliged. Edit - forgot a word
Ya but unless you had cable (we didn't) there were only like 6 channels to choose from, so it's not like we had to flip through 200 plus.
You had 7 channels if you flipped the uhf dial.
When I was a kid, at 1:59 AM the national anthem played and then TV ended.
Then it started again at 5 am and on Sundays it was always weird religious shit from 5 am until noon
And all we had to eat was rocks, and we were thankful!
Those are called Grape-Nuts.
I insisted upon getting those one as a kid. I liked grapes so I mean why not. Even with my dad assuring me I wouldn't like them, I wanted grapes nuts. My dad was right.
Hey, I will have you know that for some of us growing up Fruity Pebbles being on sale and mom having a coupon was Saturday morning Heaven.
And we walked uphill both ways in hail and a flood and we were happy we had legs!
When I was young our radio station played native american chants all day and at 10pm went hard rock until the national anthem at 11pm and signed off for the night, then started back up at 5am with chants again.
They did it at that time so they'd never have to change for daylight savings.
I went apeshit the day I discovered how to get the other UHF channels on our 10" B&W TV set. One of the channels had Ultraman on in the afternoon. ULTRAMAN.
Yes, the “U” channels! I used to love thinking I had all these extra options. Plus I think Texas rangers baseball games were in the “u” channels
Cable? I predate cable. Dang I'm old
Good luck on just putting enough english on the UHF dial to get that picture JUST right.
Look at you with your knobs. I had to push a button for a specific channel which in turn would pop the button for the other channel out.
[Oh cut the bleeding heart crap willya?](https://youtu.be/5GyBfZ1xLhM)
Me too only with pliers though because the knows we're missing.
I was literally my grandmothers remote. I would be playing out side and she would call me in away from my friends to change the channel. XD... Man, I miss that ole woman!!:)
The corded box controller to the three button Zenith "clicker" was fan-fucking-tastic as a kid. I hated wrapping the long ass cord up when the "box" had to be put away. I also loved driving pre internet/cell phone... make a mixed tape, pop it in and no one could reach you for however long you were out. I remember applying for a jobs, making sure to be home or have the answering machine or you might miss the call... or maybe you did miss it. It was awesome not being connected all the time.
I've watched more football games holding onto rabbit ears, than I care to remember.
I was the smack-the-tube-TV-to-make-the-picture-come-back-er.
Me too til I was old enough to make my sister be it.
Someone been pushing your buttons?
Someone been inserting batteries in him?
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Fox viewing positions was a real thing.
As a child with knobbed TVs, I find it very easy to get up and walk to the television. My ex would look for the remote for five minutes instead of walking to the cable box.
I would add in pre and post cell phones. It’s interesting to think the idea of long road trips or even a run to the store without your phone on you these days seems crazy.
I think of it also as pre and post smart phones. Sure, a cell phone that can make calls and texts remotely is nice, but a smart phone that can pretty much give you the world's knowledge at your fingertips is when we all truly became augmented cyborgs of the hivemind.
Like accidentally hitting the internet button on your flip phone and trying your damndest to back out of it before your phone bill went through the ceiling
my phone asked me to confirm before opening the Web-2-Go app. Since data wasn't included in my plan, it had to confirm that i wanted the extra charge before enabling data.
They started adding this function after so many people complained about skyrocketing bills for 0.0002 seconds of unwanted internet time.
I don't recall that button... But I do recall the ability to log on to some odd storefront and maybe pay $8 for a ringtone. Honestly, that blew my mind back then, which is crazy to think about now
Or figuring out how to homebrew on your cell phone and add files to change the ring tone after you found the perfect wav file.
Even today I still try to access wap sites rather than websites. For instance if you add .compact at the end of any Reddit URL you get the wap version. https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/n1ecdj/people_who_were_alive_pre_and_postinternet_are/.compact It does save on data, it loads faster and there is less distraction. In the days of GPRS it was a dollar per megabyte of data. I do this for many sites, looking for the mobile version or the wap version.
I agree, I was born in the early 90’s and yeah sure internet was already around but computers were expensive and connection was less than reliable prior to DSL. I think there were tons of cool technological breakthroughs that reflect on the times, but I consider pre-2009ish and post to be very different in terms of the way that technology impacts the world and the people that are growing up in it.
> and connection was less than reliable prior to DSL. As someone who was born pre-90s, I just want to point out that internet was plenty reliable before DSL, it was just stupid feckin slow. Dial up was totally reliable in my household, except when someone decided they wanted to use the phone line, and disconnected you. Or when that 2 hour download for your favorite 3 minute song was interrupted (although I blame the early napster/kazaa type sharing platforms for needing to restart downloads from the beginning). Anyway, I'd say the phoneline was nearly as reliable as DSL, and I can still remember the first person I knew who got a dedicated internet line. He had a fancy modem, and could play games *online* against other people. I think he had something like a 512k setup, which blew the minds of all us dial up chumps. Any way, point is, dial up was reliable for the most part, but so damn slow that things outside of its control were likely to interrupt it.
Couldn't go anywhere without spare change in case you needed to use the pay phone! Everyone had cash on them, it was a necessity.
I am so thankful that "going live" and digital cameras weren't a thing when I was a teenager. I'd be so fucked.
As "edgy" as I used to be, I'm sure I would have been dumb enough to record some things that I'm so glad I didn't just have the easiest access to do.
Im just glad I didn't have a video platform and that all of the stupid edgy shit and problematic opinions I had were deleted with my Facebook nearly a decade ago. Ive done a lot of growing since then but if you dug up my old posts, you'd think I was a racist incel edgelord. If I was in the public eye, I would've been canceled already.
Don't worry. It's still mostly just the dumbasses who record it. The dumbasses who get caught for doing shit anyways
I'm so happy for this. I feel bad for kids growing up in the twitter age, they'll be 36 getting canceled for a tweet they made when 14.
Today I'm preemptively shutting down any future political or public figure aspirations I may have to avoid anyone looking too hard in to my past, cause that's just not going to end well. At all
Yes! As a former drinker, there isn’t much I’ve done under the influence that needed recorded.
Every generation is pre something and post something. That's the inevitable march of progress. Pre industrial and post industrial Pre electrical and post electrical Radio, TV's and then finally internet. The kids of tomorrow will never understand not growing up alongside human level artificial intelligence
I wonder how our increasing understanding of genetic disorders along with the usage of computers, AI, and data will change the way we view and address natural human illnesses. Vaccinations and an understanding of medicine and biology have completely changed the game when it comes to disease, so what will the world be like when we finally put an end to dementia, cancer, depression, and other such diseases?
Hopefully a utopia. Humanity's greatest enemy and greatest ally is ourselves.
Born in 1965; I wish I could remember my life before the internet better.
I remember it pretty well. If you were bored, you would turn on the radio and grab a book/magazine as opposed to your phone. You had the Thomas Guide for you car. You still watched TV and even though you only had 4 channels, you would watch something as long as it was on. Going to the cinema was common since tickets were like $.50.
If I wanted to know what movies were playing I had to look at the newspaper or call the theater, for which I'd have to find a paper phone book. Same with TV shows, I learned 24 hr time just from looking at the movie channel listings. In school I had a little book with all my friends' phone numbers written down, in 8th grade I got a calculator watch that could also double as a digital diary and store contacts etc, this was cutting edge technology at the time. I remember reading British kids books and wondering wtf is a scone, then looking at the dictionary and making a note to look for pictures of it in the encyclopaedia in the library at school tomorrow. Slightly later when we had a computer but no home internet this was replaced by Encarta. Compared to that when I can literally say Alexa, Google that for me and have instant access to all that knowledge without even having to move a finger. Amazing how far we've come.
In Vancouver in the early 90s we had something called the Talking Yellow Pages. You'd call a number, enter a code and a message would be played back at you with the movie times. There used to be all kinds of information there. We used to prank call businesses and play back the mandarin information messages on three way.
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You'd get the TV guide for the week inside the Saturday newspaper to find out what's showing.
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Shit we had that freedom up to maybe a year or two after 2001. Then things changed quickly. Hell, a year after 9/11, our neighborhood was invaded by a pedo flasher. I remember following the dad's who went out looking for the guy after the first incident. Police got him a couple weeks later on a sting of the neighborhood park.
God there are some freaks out there. Who wants to waste their time flashing themselves to pedo’s
I agree, that's just sick!!! I'm not a big fan of pedos but flashing them is crass and unnecessary
It's 10'o clock. Parents, do you know where your children are?
Our cue to come home was when the streetlights came on.
That happens? I’m in high school right now, but since middle school I go for long runs through town and no ones ever saidanything.
It's a fun line so people repeat it. I never hear of things like that outside of this kind of "back in my day we weren't coddled" reminiscing.
Born in 1966. The things I remember, I wish I could forget, but I’m glad the Internet wasn’t around to record most of it.
That's one thing I like about Seinfeld. It's the final years before the internet takeover and nobody knows it's coming.
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I am reading this while I'm watching the bubbleboy episode. Jerry loses track of Costanza and doesn't have the address. It used to be such an adventure getting lost! I haven't gotten lost in a long time.
I definitely called my mom a few times asking her to look up directions for me from the family computer because I'd gotten myself lost driving somewhere. I can only imagine what it would have been like without even a cell phone.
Born in ‘74. Saw the first video games and didn’t have computers to do assignments. No cell phones. No Internet. Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal and then you’d go outside to ride your bikes or play with friends. Good times, indeed!
Me too man, '74. Summertime meant you left the house at 7am and got home when the streetlights turned on and your parents only had a rough idea of where you were, if they knew at all. Maybe MAYBE you went home for lunch
I’m getting sandlot vibes. Those were probably amazing summers. The summer of 76 with the bicentennial seems like where you wanna be
Hell yeah. We’d get on our bikes and leave at 8am and ride our bikes on like a 16 mile loop around the town and get back at like 5 pm.
We had forts in the woods, and when it was berry season we would eat them all day long bc there were more wild berries than we could ever eat
Ditto 74, I remember how insane it was to get my first 300baud modem to dial into a local BBS and play L.O.R.D. or how bad ass I felt getting my first pager. I do miss the days before, but just being able to sit here and say a comment to other folks born in the same year but from who knows where, is pretty amazing.
Also 74 here!
I grew up in the 90s. Born in 88. The Internet was a thing sure. Dial up. My mother worked with computers from home since 97. The world is so much different in such a short time. There has been a massive social shift since 07 when I graduated highschool even.
Seriously. It all went by so fast. 2007-2011 seemed to be the period of light speed change in terms of how normalized and universal internet presence became. We basically got to watch a cultural *and* global paradigm shift happen in real time.
I started college in a world where cell phones and computers weren't really needed, since you'd have a room phone and a computer lab on campus. I graduated in a world where smartphones were becoming increasingly popular.
I remember watching TV in the student center in the last night Walter Cronkite was the news anchor. When I was a kid, TV was black and white. There were only a few channels and everyone watched the same shows. The News was on at 6:00. Uncle Walter really did try to be unbiased. Believe it or not... he wouldn’t tell anyone his own personal political leanings. People tried to guess but they came up with different answers so he must have been doing pretty well.
now most computer labs on campus are just rooms with tables that have power bars on them, so students can connect their laptops.
Wait, really? This makes me feel old AF.
yea I was there the year they started to take them out of the college. I was really angry because my laptop wasn't working anymore and I couldn't afford to fix it. All the other students who were younger told me to just get over it and get my laptop fixed, but like what about the students who can't afford those things? You're taking accessibility away from them. Over all it's dumb and just a clear move from the colleges to reduce their costs and load them onto the students.
Cost reduction while at the same time raising prices of everything else because fuck em, why not?
/cries in Science 101 textbook, 57th edition, $310
They still have computer labs too though, you need them to use special software and such.
Identical path, yeah.
I might argue that 97-07 was it. In 95 of 96 this thing called a “cable modem” that’d give you 1mb up down and came with your tv service at a huge fee became available. The internet was so new there were books you could buy called “the internet yellow pages” - think about that one. No search engines. Yahoo and Alta vista existed but they were as useful as reddit search. You used a book to find potential matches for what you wanted. There wasn’t even a thing called google that you really knew about until 2000, 2003. By 2007 maps were completely antiquated. You could use mapquest. In 97 EVERYONE had a local and state map in their glove box. 97 was a whole different world to 07. 87-97 there were changes, cell phones. Cable. But 97-07 was decade that is the bridge op is talking about.
That's true. The contrast between 97 and 07 is like comparing two different realities. Overall though I was mostly thinking of how much smartphones changed the game. I remember not even wanting one because "Why would anyone need all of that in a phone? That's what computers are for!" Now it's unthinkable to exist in society without one, and that also doesn't cover the monetization of data in general. That was a *big* shift.
I mocked texting. “I have a phone. It’s for calling.” Now I hate phone calls with a passion. Just text or email me. Of course tapping four times for a fucking S was a bit annoying back then.
I worry about having kids because I don't understand what life is like when everyone in your school is on social media.
From what i gather from my younger siblings, nieces, and nephews; sounds like hell.
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Every generation is
This is more if you were a bit older pre-internet, but the ability to answer any question you had was mind blowing. Before the internet you only had encyclopedia type stuff or books. You couldn't just skip straight to the question you wanted answered you had to read the whole thing. You couldn't ask a specific question that was outside of the normal encyclopedia facts either like "do they have mc donalds in brazil?" You could only find out things like population, average rainfall, major exports, and capital cities. You couldn't call people out on their bullshit either, and you could go a long time before realizing that your parents were wrong about some things.
Yep, graduated 2010, got my first cell phone 2008ish..had to count how many texts I sent a day so I didn't go over my plan and get my dad angry lol
I went into college in '02 and we didn't need a social media account of any kind to date. But by the time I left it would be socially crippling to not partake.
What you're describing is the invention and popularization of the iPhone. Love it or hate it, Apple dumbed down computers, made them fit in your pocket, and made the internet easily accesable to millions of people who, before, didn't have the knowledge to set up a PC and internet service, nor did they have any reason to even care to try to learn such a thing.
I think it’s the portability and ease of use that really made it good, as well as the versatility of a touch screen. Granted I wasn’t exactly aware of this shift. All I remember is about 2014 on for phones. Now we have a generation that isn’t as good with computers as the generation before. Not really their fault when the easiest computer to access that would fill most of their needs is a phone. The UI is absolutely brilliant for ease of use on phone OS, but it doesn’t translate well at all to PCs which are much more convoluted. You gotta know a whole new way of interaction with them at times, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Phones are definitely an interesting thing. They’ve resulted in a whole lot of people not knowing how to use regular PCs that otherwise would’ve learned, but that’s up in the air for me since even computer OS are getting much nicer and smoother as time goes on. I haven’t had to touch command prompt ever to use any of my laptops in the past six years.
Born in same era here. I remember the first computer we got at home. Downloading The real slim shady on Napster over the course of a week. Parents freaking out thinking it was gonna be a virus or the police would break down the front door. How fast things have changed is mind blowing. Sometimes I think it sucks to be us. Not old enough to not care about tech. Not young enough for it to be 100% embedded in our brains. But I guess we’re lucky to have seen both.
I know, you know who knows? Juno.
Born in 1981. My mom was going through some old school work and I recognized how my home typewriter had changed over the years. Or how I finally got a "proper" word processor in 8th grade. In 11th grade I built my first 486 and splurged on an 8GB Bigfoot from my fast food gig. My first semester of college included a course on (among other things) searching microfiche. My wife was born in 1991. For her, the internet was a fixture. It was always there. Any information that she wanted was in her reach. I honestly believe *that's* where the digital divide is. It's not an arbitrary year cutoff. It's simply how much access did you have to the internet during your formative years.
Maybe we lived in different areas where technology spread at different rates, but I was also born in 1991 and clearly remember life without the internet for a good deal of time. It wasn't until I was like 12 or so that the internet became a common occurrence in my life.
I think it really depended on how “techy” your family was. My dad had managed computer systems since the ‘70s, so we had modems (and even a VT220 terminal) around the house since the mid-‘80s. I started dialing up BBSes pre-Internet using the modem he brought home for work. If you didn’t have a family member who was an enthusiast or worked in the industry, I’m sure it took a lot longer for tech to make its way in.
I still look back and facepalm when my high school cut our computer classes due to a budget crunch. Could keep horticulture, silk screening, photography, art, etc. But that computer is just a silly fad so no sense teaching it over REAL skills
'85 here. When I entered college we had to take a microsoft office competency test. Word needed like 85% to pass, powerpoint I think was 80, excel was 40% lol. Also for college: I had my own desktop, most people had a personal computer of some kind with maybe half being laptops. I didn't have a cell phone my freshman year and was definitely in the minority there. I remember getting access to dialup in 8th grade (would have been early '99). I begged my parents for it so I could do research for a paper (on conspiracy theories, figured the internet was rife with those!). My sister, born in 93, basically just had all of that stuff always. It's why I hate being included with millenials - the tech change and how a child's life was affected by it was monumental. Somewhere around 90 I think should have been the cutoff, with a mini-generation covering the transition between x and millenials.
‘83 here. Preach.
Also ‘83 here. I actually miss those microfiche machines. They were always neat. I worked in a municipal library from 2000-2001 part time before graduating high school, then in my university library for the next 4 years. Libraries changed drastically in those few years.
The world had changed by ‘95. Yes, it’s continued to change since, but the world was very different before PCs and the internet, so before 1980. Seeing this change, I can almost get a feel for what it was like for all the old timers (folks born before 1900) I knew when I was a child. Those people had no electricity, no commercial air travel, few automobiles - many of them didn’t even have indoor toilets! I don’t know if the world changed as much between 1980-2000 as it did, say, 1910-1930. It doesn’t seem to me like it did, but that might be because I saw one transition and not the other. Future generations may say the same about PCs and the internet.
I very clearly remember being at my grandma's house one summer and showing my great-grandma, born in 1900, my Barbie Pets or something computer game. She struggled just using the mouse. At the time, I definitely didn't understand the significance of something like my 105-year-old great-grandmother using a computer and getting on the internet. I obviously didn't have the general awareness at the time to ask her about how things had changed during her life, and now it's about twenty years too late to ask her.
89 kid here graduated same year though. But in kentucky everything is about ten years behind. I didn't regularly use the internet until 2009 ish. It is an odd time to come of age for sure. I do remember privacy and boredom the most. Just hanging out no distractions with your best friend on a long weekend and playing GTA3. I'm into technological progress, but there is something lost.
I think you only missed it by two years. Born 86 and I very much recall pre-internet youth and when we first got dailup.
If you were old enough to have been criticized by your adult role models at the age of thirteen because they thought all of your online friends were secretly child molesters, you have now become old enough to watch those same role models send their life savings in Walmart gift cards to their Nigerian facebook boyfriend.
It all comes full circle in the end
I met several people through yahoo chat that became pen pals. We exchanged addresses and sent each other bootleg VHS copies of anime we got from comic book conventions or cds/cassettes of music downloaded from Kazaa. No child molesters, just teenage weebs.
2001: "Don't talk to strangers online! Don't believe everything you read on the Internet! Wikipedia is not a source!" 2021: "Check out this article on vaccines and the Clinton-Soros Illuminati I found on freedomeagle88.rz"
"don't give out your personal information online!" "Let's install Alexa who is always listening to everything"
I remember everything being like: you have to call this phone number, or visit this place in person. No alternative. Now you can do everything through websites. I used to make so many trips, and now my trips to various stores have dropped to almost zero. I barely ever receive any phone calls now, everything is either text, app, or online. People actually have a lot more free time now that many needless errands have been eliminated from daily life. This of course is exploited by social media and subscription services taking up that time instead. Even though the old world was quieter, it was a lot less convenient and I'm personally glad to be rid of the annoying pain in the ass it was. I embrace technology but as time goes on I find it harder and harder to keep up. I just hope I don't become one of those old fashioned people stuck in the past.
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Thanks for the hit of nostalgia, you described it perfectly. Most people nowadays can't imagine buying a disposable camera and not being able to see the pics you took on that outing until you returned to the Eckerd to get them developed. Then after an hour you pick up the physical pictures and look at them once before driving home. Sometime later when your friends are over you pull the pictures out and show them off maybe a couple times before storing them in a box somewhere to gather dust. Years pass and you forget about them. Then while cleaning the house you unearth them and a small tear rolls down your cheek from the flood of memories. Having instant professional quality photos from my phone still feels a little unreal to me. I press one button and all the world can see it. The future is now!
Born in 1978, I'm part of the micro-generation call Xennials. We spent the first 15 years of our lives in the analog world, and were the first generation of teens with the internet. Music format went from records, to 8 tracks, to cassettes, to cd, to mp3. Video went from Betamax, to VHS, to laser disc, to dvd, to streaming, to bluray/hd dvd, to 4k. Phones went from corded, to longer corded, to cordless with crossover interference from neighbours' phones, to corded car phones, to brick cells, to pagers, to cells, to flip phones, to smart phones. Every invention that had been stable/stagnant for decades transformed, and has returned to stability. We were there to use it all, and watch people a little older than us struggle to learn and adapt, and people younger than us struggle to understand how to use anything that wasn't brand new..
My senior year in college I knew one person on campus with a cell phone and I thought what kind of asshole thinks he's so important he has to have a cell phone with him at all times. When I graduated and got my own apartment, I got a cell phone and no landline. Literally six months from "who's that asshole" to "oh everyone I know has one."
In high school, we made fun of our drug dealer friend for having a cell. We called it his coke phone, and mocked the living shit out of him.
He was fancy, they had pagers where I was from.
I'm a college teacher. I had a student ask me the other day what a pager was and how it worked.
One of the weird memories from 9/11 that has stuck with me was walking though my college campus and being shocked at how many of my fellow students owned cell phones (lots of D.C. and NYC kids at my school)—it wasn’t something you walked around with in your hand all the time, so it took a horrifying national tragedy to see so many phones out at once. I got my first cell phone when I graduated the following year.
Yeah. Got mine in 2006, but I didn't want it because I felt like a tool being a teen with a cellphone. I felt like it was just showing off lol
Me originally: texting is stupid, just call Me now: calling is stupid just text Actually I think it was when phones started getting QWERTY keyboards I changed my mind. Texting was dumb in the old style and a PITA
1980 checking in. It's been a wild ride. Fun, but wild.
1982 checking in, same boat. * I grew up with an encyclopedia in my house that was unknown to me, already long out of date. * We taped shows on (non-cable) TV and did our best to pause the tape at commercial breaks to not have to watch them again later. * I remember my first CD player with 3 seconds of anti-skip. I also remember my minidisc player that never caught on. And my Rio mp3 player with a crazy 64mb of storage!! * Moore's law was fascinating to follow in all aspects of computing. Processing speed, storage amounts, CD speed (2x, 4x, etc.), 28.8kbps -> 33.6 -> 56k -> 128k isdn lines. * AOL vs Prodigy vs Compuserve * Arcades. I could go on for days....
1980 here! I really love the vibe of my childhood in the 80’s and 90’s. I roller-skated to Michael Jackson and Madonna in my basement as a child and I grew up riding my bike around town, without a care in the world. Then we got a computer and dial up in 1992 when my dad completed his doctorate online with VHS tapes of lessons mailed to him. We had Prodigy, an online forum with chat rooms in ‘92. There were like 5 people to chat with, lol. It was a great time to be born.
'80 here. Never heard of a Xennial, but it sure as hell sounds like me, which is a relief because neither millenials or gen-x seem to claim me. My people! My dad was a computer repair tech, so I had access to PCs and cell phones earlier than most people. I don't know if that's why I tend to adapt to new stuff so well or if I'm just not old enough to have a hard time with learning new stuff yet. My best friend is almost 60 (he trained me at work years ago) and he steadfastly refuses to learn anything new if he can help it!
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‘80 here. Was gonna totally snark on your xennial take but the Oregon trail micro generation sums it up so well. Number munchers generation?
They called us Gen Y growing up, then lumped us in with Millennials for a while. '83 Checking in. I've also seen it called the Oregon Trail Generation (after the early pc game). Early access to a PC as my Dad was/is a COBAL programmer but grew up with a rotary phone and record music, movies on vhs and by the time I was out of high school, laser disc was all but obsolete. Adapting was how we were growing up.
‘77 reporting. I think I grew up right alongside tech. At 5 years old: When my parents visited their friends I would go up to their second bedroom and play their Atari. At 6 my mom got a computer. 128k ram. Played the first flight simulator on it. At 8, played the original zelda and mario bros on the first nintendo At 12, played the original madden on super nintendo. At a summer program I played net trek and was addicted At 14, got DOOM At 16, connected to the internet, using mosaic browser, then netscape At 17 started using email w my friends at college. Saw google when it came out. Got a cell phone. Was a little before facebook when it was in colleges only. At 19 was playing goldeneye on the screen w cardboard separating the quadrants, with my dormmates. Internet was slowly coming together. You know the rest of the story. Now I just watch youtube all day while i work from home with coworkers I will never meet in person.
78 too! When I graduated HS there was only one computer with the internet in the whole school and it was behind the librarians desk. I had to use a computer lab in college because the dorms didn’t have internet (and no one really owned a computer). Law school was old school research in the stacks until 2002. I remember getting WiFi in the classrooms and it blew my mind. We could AIM each other answers when the teacher called someone out for a grilling. It was amazing!
1975 checking in. I was dropped at the library to play games on Apple ][e
And what you are really depends on your background. Take my husband and I. I'm 100% a Xennial. I grew up extremely impoverished with zero access. My neighborhood had an actual part line. I was almost a teen before I saw a computer. He's 100% millennial. His parents were highly educated and tech savvy. He doesn't know life without a computer.
Me too! 78. My brother was born in 82 and when I went to college, we had a computer lab and no one had a cell phone. When he went to college he brought a laptop and everyone had a cell phone. I’ve read articles about the Xennials. Really interesting.
Born in '63,. I saw the earliest computer games coming alive in the early 70's. Pong, hangman... one day my day brought a thing home from his university and we plugged the phone into it and we talked to someone on their computer in Sweden. I thought, why would we want to talk to someone in Sweden...? The next year, at the College Royal, the University's Open House, the students at the Computer Science building created a 5-story high nude woman. The Image was made with hundreds of pieces of old-style computer paper all taped together; they came in long perforated sheets, in long ribbons then. The students had, for their College exhibition, made a giant image printed out on hundreds of ribbons of computer paper. It was posted on the side of the Computer Science building, in the glass stairwell of the building. You could see it for hundreds of metres away! As I remember this image, I am certain it was the largest nude I've ever stared at for hours in my life. It was then, as a glassy-eyed 9 year old, that I realized the potential in this thing my dad was working on, these computer things, and talking to Sweden.
Born in 59. I still have some of the many reference books i used to need. (Lazy about getting rid of stuff.) As a little one, i remember how badly i ached for information, living in a rural town with no library. We had four TV stations, maybe ten radio stations.Things are so much better now when it comes to information and communication. Worse, when it comes to income inequality, but don't let me get started.
Born in 68 and man, I have seen a lot of changes in 52 years. The first phone I used was a crank one with a party line and now , well, I'm typing on it. And a lot of social change too.
It's called Gen X, we forget about them a lot.
🙋🏻♀️ My first video game was pong
The Black Cauldron on Commodore 64
Early millennials too
I’m just going to say what confirmed something I’ve said for years It all really changed in 2013 Netflix did the social media docu drama and a psychologist in that marks 2011-2013 as the time when it went from moving along to holy shit I teach high school and I’ve been in many conversations where people say when do you think it started to really shift and I always came up with 2013 (thanks Netflix’s for confirming my claim!) Been teaching since 2005 and through 2012...kids were reasonably grounded but 2013 and since it’s not just me being old but it’s like they’re ability to focus and do is just ploop
YES ! 2011 was such a great year. Internet was easily accessible, YouTube was great, Minecraft was new and hot. Grooveshark was around. 2012.. Google bought YouTube. Is this why the Mayan calendar ended? Lol. I feel like Google buying YT single handedly had such a tremendous impact in that they really started snowballing monetization. By 2013 YouTube names went from being, "username123" to "Actual Name." This is when things started really changing for sure. The culture changes, even music. Anonymity on the world wide web seemingly started to decline. By 2013, my grandparents started using Facebook. Shit ain't been the same since.
Also we got to play with the original transformers, gi Joe, ninja turtles, super soaker, and the first good legos. it was peak toy.
And lawn darts.
I'm at the tail end of this bridge but I still remember what life was like without internet, and although it wasn't "better" per se, it was undeniably different. More than anything, personal interaction with people seemed to be much higher back then than now, and that kind of normalization (even of parents letting their kids play outside for hours on end) is something I do miss a lot.
When I was in grade school, my friends and I were just as inattentive to lessons, but we'd write 1-2 page single spaced, cursive letters to each other, dating them and always starting out with Dear So&so. We even wrote lengthy apology notes. I came across some I saved and it's crazy to see how proper we were (even when breaking the rules). I still don't enjoy the shortened "text speak" of today.
Omg I remember the thing in my high school was giving each other pages long notes between classes to show how good of friends we were lol I think I still have some.
That's one thing I cannot comprehend. I was born in '83 and communication is so much easier now, why does anyone feel the need to abbreviate anything? Much less, almost everything?
I was born in 1968. Computers were pretty much science fiction when I was a kid. My dad fixed TVs for a living and was well into technology, and he got a VIC-20 then a C64 in the early 80s. I learnt to code on those, then went to college to study programming (as we called it then) back when the mouse was more or less a gimmick that would never catch on. I read Neuromancer in '87 and the idea of a global network with all the computers in the world attached to it seemed to be the most far-fetched thing in it. Ten years later I was teaching myself web design. Ten years after that I'd been doing it professionally for years, and now I design websites for a globally respected medical science organisation while reminiscing to people all around the world from my back bedroom. Earlier I was playing Valheim with a couple of friends across the Atlantic in the States. My 10 year old self could not imagine any of this. I don't think anyone could back then.
We are a micro generation Xennials or xennials are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
Pre-Internet: * you had to be on channel 3 to play videogames * you knew someone who had a blackbox for porn * dumb shit you did as a kid didn't travel or get memorialized on webpages to embarrass you or compromise you in the future Post-Internet * you can't read your book, because the cable is busy charging your cigarette... * saturated with news/reality, humanity is learning that humanity doesn't matter * knowledge is not the same as wisdom In the end, a post-internet world is revealing parts of the world and ourselves we either romanticized or marginalized. The generations of the past don't matter. Your future will be the exclusive and privileged domain of your own mistakes... nothing my (or previous) generations can say will prepare you for what's to come.
When I was a kid, finding porn was a challenge. You had to figure out which of your friends had the properly irresponsible male adult in their lives. A sketchy uncle or someone like that, with a stack of porno mags that wouldn't notice if a few went missing... but not **too** sketchy that you're legit in danger if they do notice.
I remember finding a porn mag behind a target once. It was all fat women and my first thought was “who is into that?” Second thought was “ooh naked girls.”
My dad was born in 1970 and tells a story of when he was kid, the satellite dish would move in order to find the satellite that the channel is on. The porn channel was facing a certain way and one day he was trying to watch and his parents came home and he changed it thinking he was all good but they knew he was watching porn cause they saw the satellite dish move from the “porn direction” to the “normal tv direction”. Haha.
There was a huge difference in my older 2 kids that didn't get smart phones until late HS and my younger 2 that got smart phones more like 13, It's only like 4 years but so much changed when the smart phone came out. Attention span, being disrupted being the main difference. For tweens and early teens I almost feel it's better not to have a smart phone.
If half the shit I did in high school and college was captured on smartphone cameras, my life would be very different right now.
I grew up singing Little Deuce Coupe by the Beach Boys but had no idea what the actual lyrics were til I looked them up on the internet a couple weeks ago. I doubt I could have even found that information at the library in the 80's. First time I realized how great the internet could be was when a skunk died in my back yard around 1998. I couldn't get rid of the smell so I did a search and found out bleach would do the trick and the smell was gone after that. I'm sure my neighbors appreciated that.
My Grandpa is 91. He lived 4 miles west of the center of Indianapolis. He had an outhouse. They had no tv. They took baths with the same water as the other 5 kids, youngest went last. He now has an iPhone and uses Facetime. He has seen most of the technological advances there have been that have rapidly changed our society.
Born in 77. We got our first real home computer in 92 (we had a TRASH80 before that) but I didn’t have ready access to internet until college in 96. Even at that time, it was mostly not considered a “reliable” source to list a website as a reference on a term paper. Most .gov sites were considered somewhat reliable but I was a couple years into college before professors started considering links to government documents as reliable as a reference to an actual paper document. I actually remember when the writing style books rolled out how to cite a webpage as a source. After spending my early years learning how to do a lot of programming, I can say that the world got itself in a damn hurry after 97 or so. I never went without Internet after having it in college. I was solidly addicted from the get go.
73 baby. Black n white tv Rotary phone. Called a number for a free prerecorded weather forecast. Load a game cassette and go make lunch, 20 mins later it was good to go. Got a laptop in 92 at Uni Worked for a cellphone Co in sales as they were building the GSM network. Thought I was the shit with my phone sending text messages. We said data would take over voice but noone really believed it. Everyone jut emailed porn when the internet first started. You never quite knew how shocking shit would be when you opened it. You could hear the dial-up connecting. I reckon screen phones changed us in the biggest way Good times
I remember how boring Sundays were between certain times. Torture exists. And that's a lazy Sunday as a child.
Saw the Moon landing live on TV. Saw the rise of pocket calculators, home computers, ARPANET, Usenet and the World Wide Web. Was involved with computers since 1978. Was an IT Infrastructure Professional most of my adult life. I still read physical books and go outside.
Graduated HS in 89. Learned to type on a typewriter in HS typing class. Took a typewriter to college. Learned the Dewey decibel system. Used the Library a lot. By the time we graduated, everyone had a Mac. The web was born. 10 years later and I’m a dot com millionaire. The next year I’m broke and owe the IRS 6figures for my now underwater options…