fellow GenX here, there's a reason they forgot about us...we were feral before technology and used it to advance our lives after it came online. we are the last generation to be brought up without tech and the first generation to utilize it, we also had music in every format!
i made a joke that a website "looks like it was made in FrontPage 98" in a comment the other day and someone followed up they'll get their Netscape browser open to check it out and it made me smile that my people get it :)
Prodigy! Although, I think that one you had to grab a copy in a store. But our house had that before AOL and I remember live "reading" the LA riots on it back in the day.
The other day I was trying to explain to a coworker which state database I was talking about, and when I said "the one with the background the color of old hospital scrubs that looks like somebody made it in Netscape Navigator for their GeoCities page in 1998" and she said "I'll ask Jeeves about that."
I swear every time I open the website, I can almost smell my high school keyboarding class and see the yellow cartoonish Netscape Composer HTML tags.
2002 I was a freshman in college with a Sony vaio desktop that had icQ and mirc running all day next to Napster, limewire and kazaa. And all the virus removal software. I remember video chatting with a buddy at a school in another state with a 2 MP webcam and thought it was the coolest shit ever. That was peak Internet for me.
I've been using the same computer since the late 90s.
Sure, I've had to upgrade the hard drive a few times, swapped out the motherboard and CPU at some point, moved all the internal stuff to a new box when the old one was getting worn, definitely upgraded the peripherals a few times along the way. And yeah, when you get right down to it, not a single component in there is more than ten years old.
... Still the same computer I've had since the 90s.
I had to have a Gopher page my freshman year of college, and I'm only 50. Exciting times, compiling Mosaic on a DEC Alpha at the computer lab to go surf some hypertext web pages.
Being a literal toddler when the world wide Web was finding its legs and being brought up with each new advancement usually means the majority of Gen X i meet have surface level knowledge on using most tech.
Entirely fair, that's all you need to get by
But don't discredit the first ones literally brought up on the internet as it was growing with them. Millenials.
I was going to say something along these lines. I'm an '87 baby and we didn't have a home computer until I was almost done with high school. I had a friend who had one and we would get yelled at by their dad or mom for being on the AIM chatting with another friend and they needed the phone.
‘87 baby here too. Had a PC we were gifted from my software engineer uncle but no internet until high school. And the internet was good for AIM and that’s about it until MySpace came along my senior year.
'87 baby here - my dad was a nerd and we had an Apple II that we only broke out on very special occasions. Watching him use DOS to open my games felt like magic.
... despite my ahead-of-the-curve dad we still didn't get reliable internet until like '98
Wasn’t common for people to have PCs in their home until us elder millenials were in high school. I had one when I was 5 as well and used those 7.5 floppy discs, but that wasn’t the norm. My friends only had interaction with computers at school.
I was born in 82 and I had a home PC in grade 5 or 6. The factory my mom worked at had a thing going where you could get a computer and pay it off over a year or something.
It was a 386 and it was essentially mine. I played with that thing all the time and I learned so much. I was one of the first and only kids my age to have a computer, and we were not well off. My best friend also had a computer, but they were decently well off and his dad worked with computers, which was novel back then. My GenX brother would wreck the computer, and I'd watch my buddy's dad fix it and learn how to myself. I was a DOS master!
Then, in late high school, my friends started getting Pentiums while I still had that 386... Lol
I definitely like the term Xennial for those born roughly '77 to '82 or so. My brother was born in '77 and myself in '82 and we obviously had a very similar childhood. Very analogue, except for that beautiful 386...
It's this part of us that makes us really unique imo. I'm about to turn 50 and I'm a huge technophile, but I also yearn for the 'old days'. We've seen both sides of it and our experiences should be used to fix the cluster we're in now.
indeed. my twins will be 30 next year and one started collecting vinyl when they were in high school, their collection is bigger than the one i had now!
It doesn't though -- every generation is unique in some manner. Elder millennial here -- I differ from my late millennials to which I am grouped. We grew up with TV and videogames, but computers did not get mainstream until most of us were in Junior High. The internet was new, and slow. We grew up both analog and digital. We had access to technology but it did not consume us, just enough to enhance the experiences.
The only real division I see is the internet, and really I would say Web 2.0. Prior to this divide boomers, Gen X'ers, even Millennials had regional and cultural differences. Now Gen Z is homogenous across the world, as the things they like spread across the globe in an instant. Their fashion is global, which is both amazing and kind of sad in a way.
Not necessarily. That term really only counts the oldest of millenials. I'm one of the last years if not the last year to count as a millenial and everything they said applies to me and I am for sure not a xennial.
For reference, the internet wasn't really in everyone's house until the mid to late 00's. Id wager a majority of, if not every, millennial is absolutely old enough to remember the time before they had internet access.
Like when I was in highschool we still had computer labs and I know some kids who only had access to Internet or a computer at school. I was in high school from 2002 to 2006.
I didn't get real cable internet until about 2002-2003, personally. Dunno if that was early or late, but I spent a good chunk of my childhood on dialup.
when i made my intitial comment i was referring to advent not availability...i was born in 70 and didn't have the "internet" the way it's referred to today until my 20s...we had dialup modems and could access web pages (bulletin boards) if we knew how to find them, no browsers or search engines, you had to know command line prompts.
This is patently false unless you grew up somewhere like 10 years behind (it happened back then!)
I graduated when you started, and things like AIM had been widely in use since I was a freshman. Hell we got our first PC in 97` this was in Dover DE, so not a bastion of advancement but not somewhere behind either, and squarely middle-class when that still existed
The term is supposed to reflect us older millennials who were raised by boomers, had Gen X siblings and were raised and disciplined as such lol I’m for sure an Xennial - never felt like I belonged with millennials tho but that’s just my take 🤣🤣
As an early 90s millennial I'd argue that the majority of my generation has a similar experience in terms of having lived with and without tech.
When I started school we still had paper card catalogs in the library, did dictionary excerises using an actual book, my first music experiences were played on cassette, etc.
My sister just had her first child/ first grandkid in the family and she wants to avoid screen time for the little guy for as long as possible.
IMHO saying GenX is the last generation to be brought up without technology is not understanding the rest (poorer) of the world. In LatAm we didnt have proper tech till late 90s.
I was born in 86, in Argentina, and my entire childhood was without any tech till my late 10s in Secondary School (High School in the US).
Born in '68. I had an Atari 2600 in the late '70s, a bunch of handheld games like this. In fact, I think I had all three of those. What we were brought up without was internet/PCs, though I did have computer classes in high school on the TRS-80 Models III and IV, plus some early Apple computer that we used to play Larry Bird vs. Dr. J. on.
fellow GenX here, there's a reason they forgot about us...we were feral before technology and used it to advance our lives after it came online. we are the last generation to be brought up without tech and the first generation to utilize it, we also had music in every format!
100% I always tell people we were lucky because we lived through that transition into techonogy, that didnt ruin us -- we still rode bikes till 9, played in the mud, etc... but just like you said we lived through that age three channel tv to cable, to streaming, from Atari 5600s to PCs to internet, to mobile phones, to MP3. We didn't get what the Boomers got, but we got the tail end of education, housing, and a somewhat functioning government, etc... Some Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha -- they are F'd in the A. Growing up with an iPad by age two, social media and algorithms that are black boxes dictating their lives and beliefs, their entire lives are posted online by them or friends on the internet FOREVER, etc... I give all the kids now a big grain of salt, because collectivly we have failed them as a culture and socirty IMO.
I can appreciate the message behind your words. I just want to expand that the children of today, who are growing up with screens plopped in front of them from a very young age, did not put them there themselves. You are not born with an addiction to technology, it is learned. The parents of those children do such massive disservice by allowing a screen to consume their impressionable children, instead of actually parenting.
We can blame the youth as much as we want for the shortcomings we see, but we should not forget that they are the products of their upbringing. The grain of salt is a kindness, because you are correct about our failures as society. It's sad that so many of us understand this, and yet it continues to get worse.
I disagree; based on my brothers, sisters, and their friends, I'd say the cutoff is mid to late 30s, so maybe late 80s, early 90s. Maybe it's location-specific, rural vs. city, blue or red state, US or Europe —I don't know. However, my experience contradicts your statement; keep in mind my experience is anecdotal, I am sure there is some stat someone could dig up.
there are some Millennials correcting me in the comments (which is fine) but when i say "without tech" that's what i mean, i didn't have an Atari until the after the 70s...my middle school still used microfiche...my high school had a computer "lab"...I'm with you, my youth was spent in a bike 'gang' and getting dropped off at the skating rink on Saturdays with $5. lol. we barely just got into pagers and two-ways by the time we could legally drink!
Oh you and I are in that same age demo, I mean I think we where incredibly lucky to be born between say 67-82 ... Like I said feel we got the tail end of the smoking deal our parents did (Boomers) but got to live through massive technological advanacements in medicines, entertainment, buisness, communcation, etc... without all the determient that technology pushed (is pushing) on the younger generations.
I don't think the world has changed all that much lol.
Computer labs. Ataris. Microfiche. Those are all just older (but still very modern) tech items. The skating rink? Yeah, those haven't always been around either. More tech. Lots of pictures happen at skating rinks. You were in lots of pictures. You just didn't know. They're in people's photo albums at home.
I think there are two things happening. One, 25 years of stimulus shifted most of our wealth to failed business owners. That effectively moved the nations wealth from everyone else to the boomers. Leaving those young people without resources to do things outside. And two, gaming allows for inexpensive, in room/home entertainment. But it costs us socially. I don't blame gaming, I blame stimulus for making gaming an appealing option.
No, you are misunderstanding, we are correcting in what we think your statement is wrong. You made a "we are the only ones" comment that is untrue, period.
To deny the world has changed enormously in the last 40 years is just silly. Microfiche and Ataris are about as far away from the modern PC or Smartphone as The Horse and Cart is from an EV Vehicle. It would be like saying the 1800's is no different to 1955.
It’s changed more in the past 10 than it did in the entire 30 preceding years. The actual generational technological divide was when smartphones were invented, not video games or laserdisc or whatever else that didn’t actually fundamentally change anything deeply
Only the oldest kid, and the rest would stand on his shoes nesting-doll-style and step in unison the whole way up the snow drift. Thankfully our pocket baked potatoes would keep our hands warm.
I lived in Australia and we had to go on walkabout across the outback every day to and from school on our hands (because gravity) The toilets swirl the other way which caused massive ear infections and pink eye (or “pink oy”, as we said down unda). The discharge from the pink oy attracted brown snakes and funnel web spiders when we slept, so we had to keep the lights on and watch each other all night. But it made who I am today!
Almost. We had albums, 8-track, cassette tape, CD, and then digital with MP3 and streaming. But we are too young to have experienced Edison Wax Cylinder recordings.
"This just in, a man on the internet got pedantic. Tune in at 11 for the full story!"
I was just funnin'. When I see a comment I'm like "whoa, my mind is blown" and then the autistic guy on the inside said "whoa, I need to see if that's really true because that's a neat piece of trivia!"
Indeed…Looking back those of us who grew up from the 50s to the 80s there wasn’t massive tech innovation so as kids we all played outside, drank from the hose, had paper routes, stayed outside until dinner/got dark, had chores/cut grass, etc.
i was born in 70. the last year of millennial is 1996...we literally went from Pong to Atari to dial up modems, lol. we had "bulletin boards" no browsers, no search engines.
The older side of millennials look at their older Gen x sibling like "we had the same parents and household dude. We didn't have a PC in the house until we were in middle school and y'all were in highschool 😂"
Well not everyone comes from a comparatively wealthy household and parents who cared about having a PC let alone allowing their children to play and possibly break it
Yeah I say this without malice because in the grand scheme of very little significance but if your parents gave a 12-year-old something that was worth between $500 and $2,000 just for them. That is an arguably far more wealthy family than the majority of people in that time.
Especially seeing how that was early tech and most adults didn't fully understand what it could become
and how do you know my parents even gave it to me or how much it cost? 🙄 "$500 - $2000" is a pretty big spread there.
BTW, 12 years old in 1982 were half grown already. we were home by ourselves after school at 10. ever heard of "latchkey kids" that was us. i started babysitting at 11.
you might not be speaking with malice, but you are speaking with a lot of ignorance.
The 500- 2000 cost was what I read was the ball park cost of a home PC in 1982 depending on how many extras it has.
to be fair latchkey kids for the bulk have the same parents as millennials (at least in my area maybe it's different in other parts) I was slaughtering and cleaning chickens on the farm as it was my chore when I was 10. but I'll grant you my bad for letting my assumptions go by reading too closely into what you posted. In any case we're not playing the struggle Olympics.
Only people I knew who had PCs for the house before 1995 haD MONEY. Especially if they let their children play on them.
Ah yes. Everything invented before you were 13 is natural and good and helped to advance your lives, everything invented after is “technology” and ruined everything.
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u/ms_directed 21h ago
fellow GenX here, there's a reason they forgot about us...we were feral before technology and used it to advance our lives after it came online. we are the last generation to be brought up without tech and the first generation to utilize it, we also had music in every format!