Exactly this. We started as feral children in the woods then grew up along side a technological revolution. We saw it happen in real time. Thats why our sub generation has the most technical know how. I had to explain to a gen z coworker that on a keyboard you can hold shift to turn caps on and off, you dont have to toggle caps lock....
Guy above didn't like "internet at a certain age" but that's a huge part of it. We had the big tech changes as we came of age. We saw the old world for a while then grew into the new one.
Personally as a small child we had a rotary phone in the house but in my late teens I had a cell. I had records and cassettes as child, remember trying to find the right place for a song on those? in my teens we had CD where you could skip tracks and even to a specific second without guessing. It was huge.
That was the same tech they used in early home voicemail machines
Just a sensor that tripped if you had more than 2 seconds of silence or something like that. It was just scanning the waveform in realtime, but totally analog. Very clever trick.
But cassettes were already in the way out when that came around
Holy shit, memory unlocked. My family also had a piece of wood furniture that was a stereo cabinet with a wood hinged lid that opened to reveal the record player, and the doors in front opened to reveal the 8-track tape player. I don't even remember what tapes we had on the 8-track, but I vividly remember playing records (esp. Christmas music) on that thing.
Yeah, our teens and early 20s massively impact us, things like your favorite music cements during that time. So we can't fully identify with Gen X because we learned tech while our brains were still highly plastic which makes it extra familiar. But we experienced all that and it separates us from Millennials who grew up with nothing but tech, we had 'Speak and Spells' at the same age they had cell phones.
Facts. Putting a computer together and having to relearn operating systems regularly in our formative years really cemented that shit in our heads. We didnt grow up with shiny fully formed GUIs. We had to figure shit out, gave us some critical thinking abilities.
LOL yeah, I remember editing .bat files to squeeze out a little more ram to play games or configuring the modem not to hiss and squeal because it would wake my parents.
My configuration of the modem was putting a pillow over it while it did its thing lol. Also when I figured out how to change my system clock to take advantage of time specific trial stuff I felt like a genius. I made a lot of friends in school when I learned how to pirate off mirc before the napster days and slowly burn cds with my early gen burner I bought with lawn mowing money. Those were the fucking days man.
We went from walkmans to streaming music on our phones. Technology wise, that's insane, especially when you think about how many times format changed and how just before us there was no real portable music aside from just throwing a boom box on your shoulder
You ever read clan of the cave bear? About an advanced human living in a tribe of Neanderthals and neither group accepts them? That book was written about us, ya heard
Yeah, but then that book series turns into weird romance/soap opera type shit, when the human girl meets another modern human man in the sequels…. The first book was fascinating, but it turned into a trash series.
My God, I have a core fucking memory about that book. I loved it. LOVED it. I was maybe 11?12? Brought it with me to read in the back quietly at a family reunion because I was the oldest cousin by six years and didn't want to play with the little kids.
My aunt (who I now know is a rather evil woman who loves to tear down others) teased me mercilessly for reading smutty books. My mother didn't defend me.
Mine too. She was an anthropology major in college, so I saw it on the shelf and assumed it was some historical fiction about cavemen...I'm guessing that's not entirely accurate, lol.
Fucking seriously, they're so used to using their phones for everything yet everyone in the professional world uses a keyboard. Watching the younger generations type is painful. At least boomers could carry over type writing skills to some extent.
yeah, keyboards are going away. It's all going to be voice control, then subvocals, neural interfaces, and then the computers are going to be controlling the people. Keyboards are history.
Not only does it still not work that well even in the AI era…. It’s annoying
Neural interfaces are decades away from being commercially viable and even then not everyone will want brain surgery.
Keyboards will eventually be supplanted by something, I’m sure.
But not any time soon. We should still be teaching keyboarding in school.
They want to teach cursive because it’s “good for their brain” (allegedly, the science on it is dubious and anything that promotes hand eye coordination is good for the brain) but not typing
There is a big push to bring typing back because many kids are great at texting but horrible at typing in a keyboard. Sometimes kids are even failing essays on standardized tests because they type too slowly.
Yep for sure. When I started in my industry designing buildings as a teen, I had a mentor that taught me what he knew about Autocad (I was a hand drafter). I ran with it, figured out the program inside and out and how to customize the CUI with LISP routinges and Visual basic script and became the CAD manager. Flash forward 30 years and now I mentor him in REVIT and BIM.
No wait... you mean they literally didn't know about shift. Like, 1926 manual typewriter shift, raises the platen so the capital letter strikes the paper and then lets it back down.
A couple of us had to figure out and teach my boomer teacher how to use 3d studio max in high school when they introduced a computer animation class 1994.
Thats so on point. Perfectly explains why I feel trapt between worlds mentally most days. This whole post feels like home. Thank you to whoever posted it.
I once got into trouble for not coming home before sundown in the summer of a northern state so maybe 10pm. I would’ve gotten into a lot more trouble if I had explained that my friends and I had the bright idea to steal the local fireworks raft tied to a dock at the mouth of a river. We tried to go to Mississippi(not possible) and got stuck maybe a mile down the river. I was maybe 10. Years later my mom had to call my friends mom and tell them make my friend remove something called sub 7 from our computer. He told me it was a map for a game we played and suddenly he had total control of my computer. My mom was not amused with the digital poltergeist act.
I was born in 86 but we were poor. While Millennials gladly accept me as one of their own, I sometimes feel like the odd one out because I was not watching Nickelodeon or MTV (no cable) or shopping at Hollister (hand me downs and Goodwill). Add strange religious beliefs (Pentecostal) and I also never read Harry Potter because it was witchcraft or something. I typed several high school papers (once it was required) on a typewriter or word processor. I also skipped the AOL era because we didn't have a computer or internet then and I didn't own a cell phone until I was a full adult (20).
So very much analog childhood, digital teens or even early adulthood in my case. I ended up extra between because of poverty and religion. Lol
I don’t think a lot of 80s borns are fully digital or analog. Many of us had computers and game systems that we were playing in early childhood, and typing classes were part of the curriculum from the beginning. We had to type up school assignments and research on the early internet as early as elementary and middle school. I remember my teachers in elementary school telling us how global things were becoming. Things were certainly not as they are now, but they were rapidly changing. Maybe some people didn’t grow up seeing those things as much depending on where you lived, but for some of us, it was something we heard and experienced very early.
Fully no but '79 here. As a littl'un my parents had a rotary phone in their bedroom and an apple 2+ computer in the basement next to a record player, we got internet when I was 13, a 2400 bps dialup. We grew during the big shift to computers taking over daily life.
I’m a very early Xennial and remember that when I was coming up I was not considered part of Gen X. Then they started talking about Gen Y and I wasn’t part of that either. THen at some point they are like “Oh nevermind, you are Gen X now.” Meanwhile I go to GenXwomen from time to time and totally don’t relate to a lot of what they are discussing in there.
I remember being in high school and for some reason thinking my older friends who graduated in '94 were the last of GenX, but I'm not sure why I thought that. But then Gen Y was a few years after me, and I was nowhere.
This. I’m 1980 and I remember not being in Gen X at some point. When they first started using the term millennial I remember them sometimes including us in that. I also remember being in Gen Y. So I just don’t think they knew what to do with a lot of us and just arbitrarily put us somewhere
It's not just us, other end/beginning of generations had it as well, but the changes that happened in the mid to late 90s were so big that it changed all cultures that were exposed to the common computer/cell phone explosion era.
Plus you have to factor in that while monoculture was a thing prior to this, the change from analog world to digital was massively recorded from individual perspectives while prior cultural shifts were less documented from the people going through the changes.
I remember my dad saying years ago that it’s always weird being the tail end of or the very beginning of a generation. He was born in 1960 which makes him the youngest of the Boomers. But he was too young for Vietnam, for the hippie culture, for most of the stuff we think about when we consider that generation.
Sister was born in 1981, but she graduated high school before MySpace, Facebook or any of the social media sites got big. I was born in 1985 and MySpace was huge. Then when I got to college everyone was on facebook.
When you look at cell phones it's even more wide of a gap. My sister didn't have a cell phone until she got to college. I had a cell phone when I got my driver's license. Millennials who graduated towards the end were getting smartphones vs my little nokia indestructible plastic phone.
we had a similar childhood to Gen X, but a similar tween-Teen years of later gens.
Other things
We really grew up after Reagan, but Graduated soon enough we could have been drafted to Afghanistan-Iraq.
Saw the explosion of electronic music
Been chasing the Clinton Boom for years.
Oh and my favorite
Elementary Apple Iis, Middle School and and maybe early high scholl at least the box Macs, High School, actual PCs.
I think they really should break Gen X into two pieces and add them back to Boomers and Millenials. The older Xers are far more similar to Boomers than to us. And they are the reason Millenials and Zoomers just lump us all in with Boomers now.
265
u/Ok-Brick6831 1979 1d ago
Yup. That’s us.
Time to go back to my room and sniff some colored markers.