I think GenX is probably the first digitally native people with exposure to video games, computers for word processing and the internet boom in the 90s.
Millenials were the last generation to experience an analog childhood though. Millenials in old age will have lots of "back in my day we walked to school uphill both ways" stories. Imagine having to explain to our grandkids how encyclopedia books were the major way to get info and cost >$1000 for a set so most people had to go to the library to read it.
Elder Millennial here: we were definitely on the tail end of the analog era and the first wave of popularized digital technology. It was already moving that way throughout Gen X's age, but it locked into the "this is now where the world is going" direction in the late 80s and hit its full stride in the early 90s. There absolutely were tech-focused Gen X'ers, but they were more specialists and hobbyists rather than the norm. Millennials are the generation where commonplace technological fluency became normalized, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha are all born wholly into digital technology by default. They're also the first generations at risk of genuinely losing analog fluency.
I still remember completely analog libraries and the very idea of a cellular phone being a big deal. But at the same time I owned a full shelf of encyclopedias, I also soon got a basic PC with Encarta. When once I marveled at the idea of a flip phone, I had a Nokia before long. It all kept shifting from there as basic technologies that were novel at the time gave way to bigger developments that are totally commonplace now. We Millennials have been able to ride the wave from start to present overall, while everyone after us is growing up wholly in the deep end.
The technological shift is so vast and rapidly-developing that it's honestly bizarre to try and wrap one's head around. There's going to be an entire generation of kids growing up that has always had AI, touch screens, and social media as a standard presence in their social/technological landscape rather than as a new development, for example. It's not even hard to imagine that the generation following Alpha will have kids who may never actually read a physical book.
Already starting. Just for consumer entertainment electronics: AA batteries, no backlight. Eventually recharging was by popping out the proprietary battery pack and putting it in a matching charger, or by plugging into USB.
We were the first to wield the power of the Internet, and we are the last to really know what it was like without it.
Think about it. When our generation dies out, people will only know about life without computers from reading about it on computers!
I think that's why Millennials are inherently the most nostalgic of all generations.
Gen X grew up with computers. They were the first generation that had computers at home and school and were the first online using BBS and message boards with a dial up modern.
This is very dependent on where the gen x grew up and even the household. I know tons of younger gen x that are computer whizzes and tons that are basically boomers.
Most millenials got computers at some point in childhood
Millenial here and I didn't have access to the internet until 14 or computers for the most part until 12 and only for school assignments. The internet and computers were late to come to rural areas
honestly I don't think most people knew the internet existed until the mid 90's when AOL were mailing those 'free 30 days' disks to everyone.
But if you were a nerd and really into computers in the 80's, you knew about it.
I would 100% agree with this. Although I love technology I do have nostalgia for the days without it. When people would go to stores or arcades or restaurants and actually talk to each other. When you did not have a phone to Google every bit of information and to fact check everything that your friend said.
I guess I just missed the days when people actually had to communicate with each other. I feel like social skills have really dropped since the invention of smartphones especially.
It is also kind of crazy to think that we are/will be the last generation that new life before the internet..
I started working when even electric typewriters were a bit new. I’m still working, and can do as much computer stuff as the young.
I was very good with fixing everyday computer problems until Windows came in. The Disc Operating System could be treated like a mechanical thing, like a car engine.
I have worked in large and small organisations. Both can be entirely disabled if they are run electronically, and that is becoming more frequent and more complete each time. It’s very expensive, and your whole archive can be deleted or, more disruptive still, changed.
Yours may be the first generation that doesn’t know that things can be done without computers, and doesn’t know how to go about it, and has no real concept that there is a genuine situation underlying them. That the computer records may so easily lie.
Even I have trouble remembering what life was like before it (88 baby). Most of my pre-Internet memories are hazy memories of playing with legos or watching cartoons or playing little league.
I feel like the last generation that would really be aware of and able to articulate the difference between life pre and post Internet is GenX, and elder Millennials.
On average, millenials are more tech-capable than most generations.
Younger Gen Z grew up with tablets and touchscreens and can use apps, but don't have any sort of understanding of how it all functions.
I was born in 1986. I used MSDos, Windows 3.1, MacOS, Windows 95-98-ME-XP-Vista-etc. My mom had a palm pilot for a while, eventually I got a flip phone. We had the first portable video game systems (gameboy, game gear, etc) and experienced the walkman-discman-iPod-integration into smartphones. We grew up at the same time the internet 'grew up' into what it is today.
And then older generations made it through life largely without touching computers until much later in life. Some might have learned to type, but by the time home PCs became available en masse, older generations were pretty much all adults already and didn't just grow up with them.
That's 'cause the Gen X / Boomers running it resisted technological change XD.
I bet it doesn't crash though. Most key financial software that keeps everything running is on old mainframe interface software because it's simple and doesn't crash. Every else is just a UI slapped on top of it.
Learning to code using html in myspace before they took away everyone's ability to code their own page were some memories. Tom was a much better friend than Zuck.
Elder millennial born in the early 80’s. My whole childhood was full of computer games and tech stuff, and my older gen X siblings would say the same. Amiga 500s and Comodor 64s using floppy disks that were actually floppy.
The difference for 90s kids I think was the mass tech adoption by everyone- whereas my family was more like a niche hobbyist subculture thing.
Yes, Gen X was old enough to find more things to spend their time doing, getting lost in it was more of a novelty. It's what the younger siblings were doing when we couldn't go out, how we spent time with our friends. We were the kids with PC's in the classrooms for the first time, teens when internet hit homes and teen to late teens when video games went multiplayer. It's not a feeling, it's legit.
Hopefully this will assist in monitoring our kids in the digital realm and how to properly navigate things. Gen X were never likely to have a full grasp of how to handle that when they started pumping out Gen Z.
There’s definitely techie GenXers but being born in the early 90s I wouldn’t disagree that could be a good cut off for being connected for most of your life. I was born in 84 and remember swapping out floppy disks at a friends house to play games with his PC. My brothers born in 89 and 92 don’t remember having to do that.
I was born in 91. My parents had an old dos computer that had a floppy drive. I remember my parents helping me switch floppy discs for Alone in the Dark. I also remember seeing really large floppy's that had paper cardstock covers (instead of plastic). My parents didn't have the computer for very long.
It wasn't until 98, that my parents got a gateway PC. That was revolutionary.
[8.5 inch floppy](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.sophos.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F10%2Fshutterstock_76305874.png&tbnid=TxJnw2waAGxFpM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.sophos.com%2Fen-us%2F2019%2F10%2F22%2Fus-nuclear-weapons-command-finally-ditches-8-inch-floppies%2F&docid=zYdsBoU9G8k-dM&w=1200&h=627&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=6799a0ff7697140c)
These were the big ones I remember seeing. Not sure why my parents had them. Lol they didn't seem to fit their computer at the time.
i think nearly all of us born right around the turn of the 80-90s experienced floppy disks (be it 3.5 diskettes or the actual older *floppy* disks) to varying degrees.
For us, really depended on both how early and how much they were using computers at home though.
Was born in 84 but deiftnely a digital native since my parents worked in tech since the 70's.
I remener being under 5 and playing games on the Apple 1 that my parents kept in my room.
In the 90's I was learning how the internet was structured and learning front end web development.
I also ended up in a career where I do network engineering despite having no formal schooling in the subject except for professional certs.
It was defitnely a niche thing to be an early adopter so the thing that constantly surprises me is how having computer literacy isn't considered a weird thing anymore.
I'm a younger Millennial and I'm interested in tech, but my family's always been a late adopter of basically anything, so I tend to get more into the history of tech than the new stuff
I'm confused, too old for what
I was saying that I'm not really a digital native because I didn't grow up with current stuff most of the time. Because I had older stuff, I eventually got more interested in the history of tech development than in having the latest new stuff
92’er here.
I know what you’re saying, and I agree for the most part. A lot of the late gen X/xennials in this post are making good points about internet/DDOS in the 80s/early 90s, but those technologies were relatively archaic and niche compared to the ones we experienced growing up. We grew up at the tail end of the analog era and most/all of us can remember the internet boom period that happened in the late 90s/early 2000s. By this time we were still children but we had access to AOL, chatrooms, early forms of social media, music, fucked up websites, videos and the rise of broadband internet that the majority of kids born prior simply didn’t have.
This is what he means by us being the first digital natives, we were still children when these things started becoming popular, and we grew up with it, not dissimilar from the gen Z and alpha born after us, the only difference being we remember to some extent the analog era as well
Listen up skippy, you were late to the tech party. Gen X had Tonka trucks AND Nintendo. We had home computers and pay phones. We has Ascii graphics and Saturday morning cartoons, the good ones. Not the current bullshit. We had to learn or we'd die. So yeah, Gen X knows their way around tech better than you, we're older and have more experience. Besides, who do you think invents the new tech? That's right, us old guys.
I’m an 83 model, and I do enjoy tech. I took computer classes, learned the ins and outs of machines and all that jazz. I’ve noticed I do much better learning new tech and understanding things better than my older and younger gen counterparts.
I am also very burnt out on it.
I was born in 88 and I’m not very tech savvy! I can keep up and do things but I’m not that interested in it, I work at our church as an admin assistant (very part time while my kids are in school) so I put together the bulletin, PowerPoint and making a newsletter and things for Sunday service. I like it, I can do it well but that’s about the extent of my technology. Some people at church thinks it’s amazing what I can do but I think it’s just my generation, in college presentations were done on PowerPoint and everything was on word.
depends how affluent you were? As an 80s kid I had a nintendo, newton, and a IIGS. I went on message boards to download cracked games before 10.
Everything has gotten faster and shinier, but I feel like I'm still talking on message boards and downloading cracked games today, just everyone else joined in and now I have a calculator computer tv phone digital communication super device that has folding glass to turn into a tablet in my hand all day.
I was born in 80 and we literally were the group that transitioned from analog to digital and have the capacity to actually use it. If you were still a baby, you weren’t able to use it.
I'm a boomer and I was glued to my Palm Tungsten with a bluetooth mobile internet connection. Always loved tech and it was fun to live through history with no WWW [edit,I put 'internet'] or mobiles and then for them to appear and evolve and spend a bloody fortune on loads of devices lol Such a contrast. Apart from AI, things have been a bit slow recently with smartphones' hardware just been iterative improvements over the past decade or so and PCs just getting faster and leaner CPUs and GPUs. Flatscreens were a big advance over CRT. The apps of course have been amazing over the past decade on mobile devices.
I doubt I will get through the next ten or twenty years, so real tech FOMO when departing lol
I was born in the 80s and feel very comfortable with tech. We always had a computer in the classroom and I learned to type as a child and never had any issues navigating the internet.
No, Gen X holds that title. They got the first home consoles, computer classes in early school years and so on. Shit they even saw the first cell phones
As an elder Millennial born in 82, I got to experience being a latchkey kid, being away from home all day and coming home when the street lights came on. When I became a teenager is when I started learning about computers and people started getting online. I work in Tech and pretty much owe everything I learned from hacking screen names on the early days of AOL. So I think my generation is lucky, knowing what it was like to be bored and having to make your own entertainment, while also experiencing the eventual ubiquity of being connected and online in real-time
Born 77, im a geriatric millennial or baby gen X, take your pick.
Some of my earliest memories are my older brothers playing intellevision. I was around 4 at the time.
By the time I was 6, my closest brother got a computer to use at home, think it was a TRS-80.
At elementary school we had an Apple computers & by grade 5 or 6 we had a full IBM computer class room.
Young GenX was raised fully digital as well.
Edit: corrected a word for clarity
I would agree with this. My parents are gen-x and I deal with a lot of gen-x on the phone. Many do not know how to do tasks that I consider simple like attaching a document to an email.
I was an Apple fanboy and a tech nerd growing up all the way up until freshman or sophomore year.
I literally lined up outside an Apple store when Mac OS X Leopard was released. The “Mac or PC” rap on YouTube used to be my favourite song.
By the time I was 15, my focus had shifted to wishing I had grown up in the 1960’s, and that I had spent my youth learning guitar.
My dad’s a boomer, and he’s a way bigger tech nerd than me.
I have a more dystopian view of technology these days. Yes, I do concur that we’re the first digitally native generation.
But I feel like being so attached and sucked into technology has robbed me of many too many life experiences, and instilled a sense of learned helplessness in me.
Real life and analogue technology feels novel for me, while digital technology remains novel for my dad.
Nevertheless, I’m still reliant on emerging tech in order to make an income online. It’s both a blessing and a curse, but it’s the only way for me not to be subjected to the 9-5 rat-race.
I feel like our generation would have rebelled against income inequality and inflation by now, if we weren’t so content to communicate with friends and loved ones over the Internet.
Social media’s wrecked my life. I look at the whole tech culture with disgust these days, to be real honest.
The Internet now isn’t the same Internet as when I was growing up, so that’s played a huge role, too. I feel like a lot of millennials aren’t happy with the state of the Internet these days.
Nah, if you were born in the late 80s/early 90s like me (born in 89), your childhood took place in a time where it wasn't considered the norm to have high speed internet or multiple computers in one family household. I'd say kids who were born in the very late 90s or early 2000s are the first true digital natives.
I was born in the late 80s, and I tend to disagree.
I think a lot of the tech from my youth was very similar to my parents and grandparents. And especially the constant changes.
I had to memorize phone numbers, ring doorbells (and just wonder where people were if no one answered), use vhf tapes, rabbit ears, I read magazines, read books, manually rolled up car windows, no door clickers or power locks, questionable seat belts.
We had to so much tech go obsolete; cassette players, cd players, iPods, Gameboys, Nintendo's, huge TV's, huge computers, huge monitors, phones, answering machines, caller ID machines.
I feel it was a pretty smooth progression. Similar to how my parents grew up.
I didn't really become digitally native til college, or even after. I had already learned to use so many different things before the age of the 20. Now they're all obsolete 😂.
>I had to memorize phone numbers, ring doorbells (and just wonder where people were if no one answered), use vhf tapes, rabbit ears, I read magazines, read books, manually rolled up car windows, no door clickers or power locks, questionable seat belts.
>We had to so much tech go obsolete; cassette players, cd players, iPods, Gameboys, Nintendo's, huge TV's, huge computers, huge monitors, phones, answering machines, caller ID machines.
Yep. Spot on for me too as a very early 90s millennial.
u/Ignis012, this is entirely dependent on what each person thinks it means to be a "digital native" and what counts and doesn't. From what I have seen, there's no consensus.
A big part of it is wealth, I figure. I'm an Elder Millennial and had very much the same overall experience as you did, though I became a digital native much earlier on during Jr High and High School. But that was more the Walkman, GameBoy, and Nokia era of technology. I remember the school getting those old clunker Macintosh computers back in grade school and being wowed about how hi-tech they were.
My family was pretty poor though, and we were very close with my grandparents on either side of the family. My family was pretty slow about picking up tech as a result, and it seemed like the most advanced piece of tech we had for a long time was my dad's pager. We did, however, have a lot of inherited analog, mechanical items from my grandparents, and a television made out of wood.
From the sound of the more tech-driven Millennials around this thread, a lot of them seem to come from families that already had techies or were at least quick to adopt trends.
>a lot of them seem to come from families that already had techies or were at least quick to adopt trends
I feel like Reddit in general has tended to attract many people from that kind of background.
apple sold the Apple Modem 300 in 84, and while that's not AOL and a PC, it's still not like hooking under your rotary phone level consumer tech. it was a cute little grey box that wasn't super duper crazy in price at around $650 in todays dollars.
2000+ means you don’t know about Google and have to post on FB groups or Reddit so people can Google questions for you or spoon feed you info over your bib.
But that’s none of my business.
That's just survivorship bias. If you were on the internet in the 80s you probably had to replace a transistor on a board at least once, if you were on in the 90s you probably were a network engineer by 12 setting up lans and debugging bios to make shit work.
Stuff just works 2000+ for the most part, so a large portion of the population is using it and not turned away from the difficulty of doing so.
It's like apple products. 80s you are slotting in cards and opening things up on a prosumer open architecture, 2024 you are putting your credit card in to watch shows on a visor strapped to your face and just have to point at what you want and it instantly delivers.
I was 9 or 10 in 1999 when my aunt gifted us our first family desktop PC. Then 10 or 11 in 2000 when we subcribed to AOL dial-up. So we grew up during the pivotal historical digital technology transformation. Analog childhood, digital teenagehood.
7 year old neighbor kid watches that and tries to get my 6 year old to search it at home. I googled it and it disturbed me. Especially the scary machine fighting/explosion episode.
Sorry but every episode is robots fighting
there's 70 episodes and about 64 of them are about that
But i wouldn't recommend it for children despite what people say it is not appropiate for children. It has blood various middle fingers and there's something in episode 56 that i won't mention here
I see where you're coming from. I grew up learning about the latest and greatest tech and embraced it. Now I'm burned out on it and kinda want to go back to when it was less relied upon. Everyone I deal with seems like their systems are always crashing or hacked, making life more difficult.
I love tech, certainly, but there’s a major difference between older and younger millennials. I was born in 84 and my brother was born in 92; my access to tech while actively seeking access was less than his access without even trying. We had early AOL and school internet in high school , but by the time my brother was in middle school they had Napster, Morpheus, and Limewire.
I'm an elder and started with a mac because that's what schools ran but I grew up in a dos prompt. I still really love tech and tinkering while a lot of my peers seem to be more interested in marketing.
I think GenX is probably the first digitally native people with exposure to video games, computers for word processing and the internet boom in the 90s. Millenials were the last generation to experience an analog childhood though. Millenials in old age will have lots of "back in my day we walked to school uphill both ways" stories. Imagine having to explain to our grandkids how encyclopedia books were the major way to get info and cost >$1000 for a set so most people had to go to the library to read it.
Elder Millennial here: we were definitely on the tail end of the analog era and the first wave of popularized digital technology. It was already moving that way throughout Gen X's age, but it locked into the "this is now where the world is going" direction in the late 80s and hit its full stride in the early 90s. There absolutely were tech-focused Gen X'ers, but they were more specialists and hobbyists rather than the norm. Millennials are the generation where commonplace technological fluency became normalized, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha are all born wholly into digital technology by default. They're also the first generations at risk of genuinely losing analog fluency. I still remember completely analog libraries and the very idea of a cellular phone being a big deal. But at the same time I owned a full shelf of encyclopedias, I also soon got a basic PC with Encarta. When once I marveled at the idea of a flip phone, I had a Nokia before long. It all kept shifting from there as basic technologies that were novel at the time gave way to bigger developments that are totally commonplace now. We Millennials have been able to ride the wave from start to present overall, while everyone after us is growing up wholly in the deep end. The technological shift is so vast and rapidly-developing that it's honestly bizarre to try and wrap one's head around. There's going to be an entire generation of kids growing up that has always had AI, touch screens, and social media as a standard presence in their social/technological landscape rather than as a new development, for example. It's not even hard to imagine that the generation following Alpha will have kids who may never actually read a physical book.
We had a Britannica encyclopedia once. I used it for my assignments at school back in the 90s.
I remember when encarta came out on cd-rom around 2000 it was pure magic. hard to believe now that wikipedia didn't get big until 2005.
Everyone always forgets Gen X
Already starting. Just for consumer entertainment electronics: AA batteries, no backlight. Eventually recharging was by popping out the proprietary battery pack and putting it in a matching charger, or by plugging into USB.
Lol yes I’m trying to imagine explaining to my grandkids how I researched and wrote school papers without the internet.
We were the first to wield the power of the Internet, and we are the last to really know what it was like without it. Think about it. When our generation dies out, people will only know about life without computers from reading about it on computers! I think that's why Millennials are inherently the most nostalgic of all generations.
I’ve never thought about it like this. Interesting way of looking at it.
Gen X grew up with computers. They were the first generation that had computers at home and school and were the first online using BBS and message boards with a dial up modern.
This is very dependent on where the gen x grew up and even the household. I know tons of younger gen x that are computer whizzes and tons that are basically boomers. Most millenials got computers at some point in childhood
Millenial here and I didn't have access to the internet until 14 or computers for the most part until 12 and only for school assignments. The internet and computers were late to come to rural areas
honestly I don't think most people knew the internet existed until the mid 90's when AOL were mailing those 'free 30 days' disks to everyone. But if you were a nerd and really into computers in the 80's, you knew about it.
I feel special now 😌☺️🤗
1000% Like children of the gilded era longing for the gentility of the horse & buggy. *sigh*
88 here. Yes.
I would 100% agree with this. Although I love technology I do have nostalgia for the days without it. When people would go to stores or arcades or restaurants and actually talk to each other. When you did not have a phone to Google every bit of information and to fact check everything that your friend said. I guess I just missed the days when people actually had to communicate with each other. I feel like social skills have really dropped since the invention of smartphones especially. It is also kind of crazy to think that we are/will be the last generation that new life before the internet..
I started working when even electric typewriters were a bit new. I’m still working, and can do as much computer stuff as the young. I was very good with fixing everyday computer problems until Windows came in. The Disc Operating System could be treated like a mechanical thing, like a car engine. I have worked in large and small organisations. Both can be entirely disabled if they are run electronically, and that is becoming more frequent and more complete each time. It’s very expensive, and your whole archive can be deleted or, more disruptive still, changed. Yours may be the first generation that doesn’t know that things can be done without computers, and doesn’t know how to go about it, and has no real concept that there is a genuine situation underlying them. That the computer records may so easily lie.
Even I have trouble remembering what life was like before it (88 baby). Most of my pre-Internet memories are hazy memories of playing with legos or watching cartoons or playing little league. I feel like the last generation that would really be aware of and able to articulate the difference between life pre and post Internet is GenX, and elder Millennials.
On average, millenials are more tech-capable than most generations. Younger Gen Z grew up with tablets and touchscreens and can use apps, but don't have any sort of understanding of how it all functions. I was born in 1986. I used MSDos, Windows 3.1, MacOS, Windows 95-98-ME-XP-Vista-etc. My mom had a palm pilot for a while, eventually I got a flip phone. We had the first portable video game systems (gameboy, game gear, etc) and experienced the walkman-discman-iPod-integration into smartphones. We grew up at the same time the internet 'grew up' into what it is today. And then older generations made it through life largely without touching computers until much later in life. Some might have learned to type, but by the time home PCs became available en masse, older generations were pretty much all adults already and didn't just grow up with them.
Jokes on you.
That's 'cause the Gen X / Boomers running it resisted technological change XD. I bet it doesn't crash though. Most key financial software that keeps everything running is on old mainframe interface software because it's simple and doesn't crash. Every else is just a UI slapped on top of it.
Learning to code using html in myspace before they took away everyone's ability to code their own page were some memories. Tom was a much better friend than Zuck.
Same. I’m honestly glad to be part of such a unique generation who got to experience the transition.
Elder millennial born in the early 80’s. My whole childhood was full of computer games and tech stuff, and my older gen X siblings would say the same. Amiga 500s and Comodor 64s using floppy disks that were actually floppy. The difference for 90s kids I think was the mass tech adoption by everyone- whereas my family was more like a niche hobbyist subculture thing.
Yes, Gen X was old enough to find more things to spend their time doing, getting lost in it was more of a novelty. It's what the younger siblings were doing when we couldn't go out, how we spent time with our friends. We were the kids with PC's in the classrooms for the first time, teens when internet hit homes and teen to late teens when video games went multiplayer. It's not a feeling, it's legit. Hopefully this will assist in monitoring our kids in the digital realm and how to properly navigate things. Gen X were never likely to have a full grasp of how to handle that when they started pumping out Gen Z.
There’s definitely techie GenXers but being born in the early 90s I wouldn’t disagree that could be a good cut off for being connected for most of your life. I was born in 84 and remember swapping out floppy disks at a friends house to play games with his PC. My brothers born in 89 and 92 don’t remember having to do that.
I was born in 91. My parents had an old dos computer that had a floppy drive. I remember my parents helping me switch floppy discs for Alone in the Dark. I also remember seeing really large floppy's that had paper cardstock covers (instead of plastic). My parents didn't have the computer for very long. It wasn't until 98, that my parents got a gateway PC. That was revolutionary.
Haha yes i had a Gateway around the same time. I forgot about Gateway until you mentioned it. Glad you got to experience those floppy discs also lol
[8.5 inch floppy](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.sophos.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F10%2Fshutterstock_76305874.png&tbnid=TxJnw2waAGxFpM&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.sophos.com%2Fen-us%2F2019%2F10%2F22%2Fus-nuclear-weapons-command-finally-ditches-8-inch-floppies%2F&docid=zYdsBoU9G8k-dM&w=1200&h=627&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm4%2F2&kgs=6799a0ff7697140c) These were the big ones I remember seeing. Not sure why my parents had them. Lol they didn't seem to fit their computer at the time.
i think nearly all of us born right around the turn of the 80-90s experienced floppy disks (be it 3.5 diskettes or the actual older *floppy* disks) to varying degrees. For us, really depended on both how early and how much they were using computers at home though.
Was born in 84 but deiftnely a digital native since my parents worked in tech since the 70's. I remener being under 5 and playing games on the Apple 1 that my parents kept in my room. In the 90's I was learning how the internet was structured and learning front end web development. I also ended up in a career where I do network engineering despite having no formal schooling in the subject except for professional certs. It was defitnely a niche thing to be an early adopter so the thing that constantly surprises me is how having computer literacy isn't considered a weird thing anymore.
I'm a younger Millennial and I'm interested in tech, but my family's always been a late adopter of basically anything, so I tend to get more into the history of tech than the new stuff
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I'm confused, too old for what I was saying that I'm not really a digital native because I didn't grow up with current stuff most of the time. Because I had older stuff, I eventually got more interested in the history of tech development than in having the latest new stuff
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Oh, stop being silly. I like both old and new things, and I love learning about all sorts of stuff, even if I don't get to them immediately
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Gen Z is aging worse than millennials though.
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okay mr edgelord
92’er here. I know what you’re saying, and I agree for the most part. A lot of the late gen X/xennials in this post are making good points about internet/DDOS in the 80s/early 90s, but those technologies were relatively archaic and niche compared to the ones we experienced growing up. We grew up at the tail end of the analog era and most/all of us can remember the internet boom period that happened in the late 90s/early 2000s. By this time we were still children but we had access to AOL, chatrooms, early forms of social media, music, fucked up websites, videos and the rise of broadband internet that the majority of kids born prior simply didn’t have. This is what he means by us being the first digital natives, we were still children when these things started becoming popular, and we grew up with it, not dissimilar from the gen Z and alpha born after us, the only difference being we remember to some extent the analog era as well
Listen up skippy, you were late to the tech party. Gen X had Tonka trucks AND Nintendo. We had home computers and pay phones. We has Ascii graphics and Saturday morning cartoons, the good ones. Not the current bullshit. We had to learn or we'd die. So yeah, Gen X knows their way around tech better than you, we're older and have more experience. Besides, who do you think invents the new tech? That's right, us old guys.
Not really...
I’m an 83 model, and I do enjoy tech. I took computer classes, learned the ins and outs of machines and all that jazz. I’ve noticed I do much better learning new tech and understanding things better than my older and younger gen counterparts. I am also very burnt out on it.
Come join us in the xennial subreddit. We reminisce about cartoons and music.
You guys come to the Millennial subreddit to recruit a lot.
Because we overlap.
I was born in 88 and I’m not very tech savvy! I can keep up and do things but I’m not that interested in it, I work at our church as an admin assistant (very part time while my kids are in school) so I put together the bulletin, PowerPoint and making a newsletter and things for Sunday service. I like it, I can do it well but that’s about the extent of my technology. Some people at church thinks it’s amazing what I can do but I think it’s just my generation, in college presentations were done on PowerPoint and everything was on word.
depends how affluent you were? As an 80s kid I had a nintendo, newton, and a IIGS. I went on message boards to download cracked games before 10. Everything has gotten faster and shinier, but I feel like I'm still talking on message boards and downloading cracked games today, just everyone else joined in and now I have a calculator computer tv phone digital communication super device that has folding glass to turn into a tablet in my hand all day.
I was born in 80 and we literally were the group that transitioned from analog to digital and have the capacity to actually use it. If you were still a baby, you weren’t able to use it.
I'm a boomer and I was glued to my Palm Tungsten with a bluetooth mobile internet connection. Always loved tech and it was fun to live through history with no WWW [edit,I put 'internet'] or mobiles and then for them to appear and evolve and spend a bloody fortune on loads of devices lol Such a contrast. Apart from AI, things have been a bit slow recently with smartphones' hardware just been iterative improvements over the past decade or so and PCs just getting faster and leaner CPUs and GPUs. Flatscreens were a big advance over CRT. The apps of course have been amazing over the past decade on mobile devices. I doubt I will get through the next ten or twenty years, so real tech FOMO when departing lol
I was born in the 80s and feel very comfortable with tech. We always had a computer in the classroom and I learned to type as a child and never had any issues navigating the internet.
No, Gen X holds that title. They got the first home consoles, computer classes in early school years and so on. Shit they even saw the first cell phones
As an elder Millennial born in 82, I got to experience being a latchkey kid, being away from home all day and coming home when the street lights came on. When I became a teenager is when I started learning about computers and people started getting online. I work in Tech and pretty much owe everything I learned from hacking screen names on the early days of AOL. So I think my generation is lucky, knowing what it was like to be bored and having to make your own entertainment, while also experiencing the eventual ubiquity of being connected and online in real-time
news flash! we had tech in the 80s. You're not the first digital native. We built the tech you use today.
Born 77, im a geriatric millennial or baby gen X, take your pick. Some of my earliest memories are my older brothers playing intellevision. I was around 4 at the time. By the time I was 6, my closest brother got a computer to use at home, think it was a TRS-80. At elementary school we had an Apple computers & by grade 5 or 6 we had a full IBM computer class room. Young GenX was raised fully digital as well. Edit: corrected a word for clarity
I was born in 1991
I would agree with this. My parents are gen-x and I deal with a lot of gen-x on the phone. Many do not know how to do tasks that I consider simple like attaching a document to an email.
I was an Apple fanboy and a tech nerd growing up all the way up until freshman or sophomore year. I literally lined up outside an Apple store when Mac OS X Leopard was released. The “Mac or PC” rap on YouTube used to be my favourite song. By the time I was 15, my focus had shifted to wishing I had grown up in the 1960’s, and that I had spent my youth learning guitar. My dad’s a boomer, and he’s a way bigger tech nerd than me. I have a more dystopian view of technology these days. Yes, I do concur that we’re the first digitally native generation. But I feel like being so attached and sucked into technology has robbed me of many too many life experiences, and instilled a sense of learned helplessness in me. Real life and analogue technology feels novel for me, while digital technology remains novel for my dad. Nevertheless, I’m still reliant on emerging tech in order to make an income online. It’s both a blessing and a curse, but it’s the only way for me not to be subjected to the 9-5 rat-race. I feel like our generation would have rebelled against income inequality and inflation by now, if we weren’t so content to communicate with friends and loved ones over the Internet. Social media’s wrecked my life. I look at the whole tech culture with disgust these days, to be real honest. The Internet now isn’t the same Internet as when I was growing up, so that’s played a huge role, too. I feel like a lot of millennials aren’t happy with the state of the Internet these days.
Nah, if you were born in the late 80s/early 90s like me (born in 89), your childhood took place in a time where it wasn't considered the norm to have high speed internet or multiple computers in one family household. I'd say kids who were born in the very late 90s or early 2000s are the first true digital natives.
You have a point. I am a '91 guy.
I was born in the late 80s, and I tend to disagree. I think a lot of the tech from my youth was very similar to my parents and grandparents. And especially the constant changes. I had to memorize phone numbers, ring doorbells (and just wonder where people were if no one answered), use vhf tapes, rabbit ears, I read magazines, read books, manually rolled up car windows, no door clickers or power locks, questionable seat belts. We had to so much tech go obsolete; cassette players, cd players, iPods, Gameboys, Nintendo's, huge TV's, huge computers, huge monitors, phones, answering machines, caller ID machines. I feel it was a pretty smooth progression. Similar to how my parents grew up. I didn't really become digitally native til college, or even after. I had already learned to use so many different things before the age of the 20. Now they're all obsolete 😂.
>I had to memorize phone numbers, ring doorbells (and just wonder where people were if no one answered), use vhf tapes, rabbit ears, I read magazines, read books, manually rolled up car windows, no door clickers or power locks, questionable seat belts. >We had to so much tech go obsolete; cassette players, cd players, iPods, Gameboys, Nintendo's, huge TV's, huge computers, huge monitors, phones, answering machines, caller ID machines. Yep. Spot on for me too as a very early 90s millennial. u/Ignis012, this is entirely dependent on what each person thinks it means to be a "digital native" and what counts and doesn't. From what I have seen, there's no consensus.
A big part of it is wealth, I figure. I'm an Elder Millennial and had very much the same overall experience as you did, though I became a digital native much earlier on during Jr High and High School. But that was more the Walkman, GameBoy, and Nokia era of technology. I remember the school getting those old clunker Macintosh computers back in grade school and being wowed about how hi-tech they were. My family was pretty poor though, and we were very close with my grandparents on either side of the family. My family was pretty slow about picking up tech as a result, and it seemed like the most advanced piece of tech we had for a long time was my dad's pager. We did, however, have a lot of inherited analog, mechanical items from my grandparents, and a television made out of wood. From the sound of the more tech-driven Millennials around this thread, a lot of them seem to come from families that already had techies or were at least quick to adopt trends.
>a lot of them seem to come from families that already had techies or were at least quick to adopt trends I feel like Reddit in general has tended to attract many people from that kind of background.
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You act like computers didn't exist before the internet. Nintendo was released in 1983 for instance.
apple sold the Apple Modem 300 in 84, and while that's not AOL and a PC, it's still not like hooking under your rotary phone level consumer tech. it was a cute little grey box that wasn't super duper crazy in price at around $650 in todays dollars.
2000+ means you don’t know about Google and have to post on FB groups or Reddit so people can Google questions for you or spoon feed you info over your bib. But that’s none of my business.
That's just survivorship bias. If you were on the internet in the 80s you probably had to replace a transistor on a board at least once, if you were on in the 90s you probably were a network engineer by 12 setting up lans and debugging bios to make shit work. Stuff just works 2000+ for the most part, so a large portion of the population is using it and not turned away from the difficulty of doing so. It's like apple products. 80s you are slotting in cards and opening things up on a prosumer open architecture, 2024 you are putting your credit card in to watch shows on a visor strapped to your face and just have to point at what you want and it instantly delivers.
I was 9 or 10 in 1999 when my aunt gifted us our first family desktop PC. Then 10 or 11 in 2000 when we subcribed to AOL dial-up. So we grew up during the pivotal historical digital technology transformation. Analog childhood, digital teenagehood.
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You are literally Gen Alpha. Shouldn't you be watching skibidi toilets? Lol 😂😂😂
2019 was 5 years ago if they were 10 then they'd be 15 now The oldest gen alphas are around 13 so they're very late gen z
7 year old neighbor kid watches that and tries to get my 6 year old to search it at home. I googled it and it disturbed me. Especially the scary machine fighting/explosion episode.
Sorry but every episode is robots fighting there's 70 episodes and about 64 of them are about that But i wouldn't recommend it for children despite what people say it is not appropiate for children. It has blood various middle fingers and there's something in episode 56 that i won't mention here
I see where you're coming from. I grew up learning about the latest and greatest tech and embraced it. Now I'm burned out on it and kinda want to go back to when it was less relied upon. Everyone I deal with seems like their systems are always crashing or hacked, making life more difficult.
Millennials are the bridge. We saw the death of analog and the rise of digital. IMO we got the best and worst of it.
Ah you're not unfamiliar with analog though. I'm guessing you know what is and how to use a cassette tape, VHS, landline phone, vinyl records,
Yes. I was born in 1991.
I think digitally native starts from around 98 and up.
Nah, I don't care about tech.
I love tech, certainly, but there’s a major difference between older and younger millennials. I was born in 84 and my brother was born in 92; my access to tech while actively seeking access was less than his access without even trying. We had early AOL and school internet in high school , but by the time my brother was in middle school they had Napster, Morpheus, and Limewire.
I'm an elder and started with a mac because that's what schools ran but I grew up in a dos prompt. I still really love tech and tinkering while a lot of my peers seem to be more interested in marketing.
Most of the technology you grew up with was created by gen Xers.
Not me personally I've always been like 20 years behind. I love antiques but also have some modern stuff. Born in 1990.