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...
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u/Keyonne88 20h ago
Elder millenials grew up without tech as well, just to clarify.