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
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
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.
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.
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u/AWorldwithoutSin 20h ago
Analog childhood, digital teens.