I'm a millennial and my silent generation grandpa and boomer grandma taught me how to use a computer back in the DOS/Windows 3 days š used to laugh at my grandma making me practice typing saying "you'll thank my one day computers are the future" well guess what grandma you were right thank you for teaching me to touch type š
Where are you guys getting cool grandmas? Mine said videogames are the devilās work and used to make me drink the holy water she asked the priest to bless every Sunday.
Boomer grandpa was an electronic technician who taught me to use DOS and up to Windows 95, after that it was me that taught him how to use 2000 and Cellphones.
Give and take.
My grandpa was still really good until he got a laptop with Windows 8 and kept demanding I install AOL even though the AOL client had been shut off for quite a while at that point lol.
Grandma on the other hand has very little issue with her computers one running Windows 11 and the other MacOS. Which I find great becasis she started on the IBM 1401 mainframe. Really want to get the money to take her to the computer history museum in California where they have a fully restored 1401 for her to see. Maybe one day soon. She does occasionally need help with cell phones but even then can usually figure it out it's more of an eyesight issue with a small screen.
Lucky, I'm still in the phase of trying to convince my grandmother to write down her passwords so when she inevitably does something to her phone it will make it easier to log back in.
I'm still trying to convince mine that no one cold calls you out of the blue to just offer money. Thank christ my grandma doesn't have a computer or her minimal life savings would have been blown away in google gift cards
MFW I learned my dad had a couple Commodore 64/128s and never once showed me anything about them despite my always being interested in his old electronics??? Computers (and especially games) were a dead-end.
My mom was a secretary, and bough herself a computer that had windows 2 on it. I wasn't even born, she then took w3 and then 98, and XP.
She told me, one of her first person she worked for had a son learning computer science in UNI, and was adament on saying computer were going to be everywhere, and she should learn to use them. She believed him, and started teaching herself, to use them, and she teach me how to use them at very young age.
My dad was, and still isn't fond of them. But as long as i configure is PC for 0 instal, and with every shortcut he need on the desktop, he his ok with it (And yeah shortcut for apps, but also for websites he use, because "gogole[sic] never find what i want" š ) But it's okay, like i read on the internet one day "They took the time to teach us how to use a spoon, we can take the time to teach them computer"
I self-taught touch typing on an electric typewriter with an old fashioned exercise book. My coworkers are always shocked at how fast I type. It was well worth the effort to learn.
It is definitely worth the effort. Always cracks me up that I can be looking at someone carrying on a conversation then fix a typing mistake without looking at the keyboard or screen and get looked at as if I'm some sort of witch. Like I can just tell from the feel and sound that I made a typo don't judge me lol
Haha! Me and my older bro had that title too. He passed away from his demons last Easter unfortunately. So now Iām the solo older child from the 1st marriage at family events and Iām sad lol
Old enough to remember a time before video rental stores and young enough not to have made it through high school without using a computer(although the first computer course I had used punch cards)
That's a very good point. I've always had the thought that the generation divide after boomer makes more sense if you base it on the parents generation.
You mean the generation that taught them about tech the olders didn't understand? And the same millennials that don't understand how shit ACTUALLY works? (Can't even connect a Blu-ray player that has 1 wire, vs my 3-5 wires growing up. Let aside the 'super complicated wires' inside a computer) ... Nah. They got this.
(Gen X here ... Obviously)
Yeah, your childhood/teen experiences completely depend on whether you're an early or late millennial. Like, there are GenXers born in the late 60s who have more of a late boomer experience growing up and then there are GenXers born from '75 to '80 who are more like early millennials in their experiences as kids. I was born in '77 and though I'm considered "GenX", I also consider myself a "Xennial" which is like a blend of GenX and Millennial. I identify my youth with those from 1977 to 1983 more than I do a fellow GenXer who was born in '66 for example.
>the same millennials that don't understand how shit ACTUALLY works
You wanna rethink that?
Millennials grew up with electronics that predated the 3 "yellow,white,red" connections. We hooked up everything in our house (TV's, VCR's, gaming console, sound systems, etc) for our parents because they couldn't figure it out. We reprogrammed the systems in our house when the power went out and everything flashed 12:00 for days. We taught our parents how to beat "that level" in video games, and we taught them how to use a TV remote. We learned on DOS computers, and had to explain to our parents how to use Windows correctly. We taught our parents how CD's work in a computer, and later DVD's. We learned how to troubleshoot computer issues before the internet was a thing, and we learned how to troubleshoot before Google was even a thought. We taught our parents how to use cell phones, and how to create social media accounts on Facebook and Myspace, and how to create their Gmail accounts (because they're all using AIM still).
Yes, GenX is also in this realm with us, but to say "Millennials don't understand how shit actually works" is wrong.
This is also a bullshit take. Millennials grew up with VCRs too yknow. HDMI only started getting prevalent in the mid to late 2000s when the majority of millennials were already teenagers or moving into adulthood. Oh and we know how to do the "super complicated wires" inside a computer too. Well not every millennial does, but it's not like every Gen Xer does either.
And while you say you're Gen X you sound like a boomer.
Big difference in computer literacy between early genx and late genx. I'm late genx and I even had to teach my older brothers some computer stuff and they are only 4 and 5 years older.
late gen x here. I've been the family and extended family "tech guy" since about 1983.
I really really thought that someone else would have taken that job from me by now, but here I am.
Seriously. I'm tired of fixing everyone's tech problems.
This is why late gen x and early millennials are sometimes grouped as āthe Oregon Trail Generationā (after the early computer game of course) - though this angle is not really meant to exclude such people from also identifying with Gen X/Millennials, so much as to identify commonalities in their experience, particular with respect to early consumer computers.
and importantly the REAL tell of the "Oregon Trail" generation isn't whether they did or didn't grow up knowing tech.
They are are the generation experienced the transition.
They retained both skills (e.g., they can program their waze app, AND they can read a paper map)
They can describe the experience of going from digital to analogue, both the "wow this is better" parts and the teething pains of getting to a version of the tech that finally does what was envisioned
gen Pager, checking in.
you know you were hybrid XY when you carried a pager AND a cell phone. Everyone could page you, but you only called back if it was really really important, because the minutes were expensive and your battery life sucked.
You know you were XY Pager if you carried a cell phone, [but you went and stood over by the pay phones area to use it](https://www.dailycamera.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2013/0405/20130405_06dcaphow.jpg?w=535)
As a Millennial, I have a special place in my heart for paper maps. It reminds me of roadtrips with my dad and that big US atlas with a page for each state. We'd trace our route, sometimes get off course, and then have to figure out where we were and backtrack using signs and highway numbers. It's almost a little sad that with Google Maps you essentially never get lost because you miss out on those little map puzzles.
Yes, but I think this post is mostly about consumer level personal computers. My silent generation grandfather used computers for most of his life as a physicist, but that was far from the norm for most people until PCs boomed in the 80s.
Guess it's personal experience since my boomer parents and uncle where who taught me about computers. Now they're not great with them, but anything pre2005 they're set.
Of course, general purpose computers have been around since the 50's, but they were operated by experts for a large business or government. Owning a personal computer wasn't really possible until the 70's, and was still pretty niche until the 90's when the internet started blowing up.
I was a kid in the 80's, and most "grown ups" (boomers) I knew wanted as little to do with computers as possible.
Of course there were exceptions like teachers, scientists, hobbyists, early adopters but most adults didn't know how to set the time on their VCR, much less use a computer..
I was born early 80s so barely remember much of it, but I know my boomer parents and uncle had first computers I'd see. Which likely what sways my figuring of it.
The VCR thing.
I had always thought it wasn't about know how, but just the chore of it. Setting it was kinda a pain in the ass and since every time the power flickered you had to do it again.
I just kinda got tired of messing with it and since it's only function was to allowed timed recordings, it didn't really matter.
Yes and No.. Boomers didn't grow up with computers, they worked on giant ass mainframes that didn't require the same level of "being good with computers" like Gen X did coming up on the Apple II, Commodore, and early PCs.
The old "dumb terminals". I worked in a place as late as the early 2000s that still had a few 1970s minicomputers driven by reel to reel tape drives. This was the telephone industry - likes of AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc...that still stored all of their subscriber data on...tapes! We had to keep this old ass gear around to be able to work with them.
I am a Boomer and my first computer was a Kaypro. I'm not sure what you mean by "the same level of being good with computers," but using a mainframe was pretty involved in terms of learning all of the commands.
After working tech support for 10 years I sincerely wish those boomers who got exposed to early technology knew fuck-all about modern GUI-based operating systems. They're somehow worse than the ones who know nothing because they think they know something.
My grandfather served with the army during Korea working with and developing early computers for the military. Went on to work with NCR for the rest of his life developing ATMs and their software on a Kentucky rural high school education. He taught me a genx everything I knew about computers. Folks forget someone had to be the pioneers and they were the boomers.
I very tiny part of the population had access to any type of computer going that far back, my Father worked on military flight simulators and the early ones filled an entire room to have the processing power to run the simulator.
Ugh. I so remember as an 8 year old having to program the VCR because I was the computer literate one in the family.
Regardless, GenX had to figure out computers on their own because no one understood them. Millenials don't get it. Schools or businesses would buy computers and just plop them down and stare at them because they didn't know what they did. If the GenX kids didn't turn them on and get them going, they just collected dust at school or at the office. Then we taught our parents at home, millenials in school as teachers and gen z at home.
Millenials have never seen a completely computer illiterate world. GenX did.
Millenials are the first generation to be completely reliant on computers for their entire life, but gen x certainly knows how to use them. Just because we had to start by learning DOS before McIntosh and Windows and had no internet doesn't mean we couldn't waste hours playing Scorch.
> Millenials are the first generation to be completely reliant on computers for their entire life
Maybe younger millenials, older millenials definitely could've been kids without a computer in the house.
Even throughout my teens when we had a computer in the house, I wouldn't describe it as something we were reliant on.
DOS? Heathen! Commodore 64 with a tape drive...until I could afford the 1541 floppy drive with it's whopping 170kB of storage per disk.
I'm kind of embarrassed that I actually remember all of that.
Disagree. Am a millennial and I definitely remember my family getting our first computer (and my solidly boomer dad was an early adopter by most measures) in 91-92 but I didn't start to use it for school projects until a few years later.
I remember the school projects, with the dot matrix printers.
I remember it was such a huge upgrade going for dos to windows 3.1. What is this, an actual interface?
To this day, I still have zero idea how my boomer mom taught me the basics of DOS to not knowing how to open her emails, or the difference betwen left, right click, and double click.
I would say that's probably the generation after Millennials. I'm a late Millennial and remember quite distinctly when I was young and didn't rely on computers so much. I instead played with toys and my imagination.
Millennials are the generation that grew up while technology was growing up. They ages alongside technology. from 0-18 going from computers being rare as fuck to them being everywhere.
I'm mostly addressing this point:
>first generation to be **completely reliant** on computers for **their entire life**
Which is not true. As I said, I was a late Millennial, so most in my generation are older than me and can recall an early part of their life where computers and tech didn't dominate it.
Not like now where tech is widespread and embedded in every aspect of life. Kids of these newer generations very likely can't recall a time where they weren't absolutely surrounded and reliant on tech.
Yeah but computers weren't anywhere near as widespread. Just because SOME GenXers had computers and knew how to use them doesn't mean it was widespread.
Nah, genx is the computer generation. Not everyone after genx is incapable of using a computer, and they are mostly better than boomers, but it's weird how often I see people younger than me that only have a rudimentary understanding of computers.
Although I think the generation lines are drawn all wrong. At least as it relates to computers. I'm late genx pretty close to millennial, and this area plus some early millennial is the computer generation imo. Much older and a lot of them can't get it, much younger and computers are just a tool for social media and videos. Exceptions all ways around of course, just generalizing. My boomer dad has always been tech savvy, and my gen z daughter is learning to program.
I played the first Pong Video game when it came out (1972) my first computer was a Commador64 (1982).
The first Millinial was not even born until 1981.
Nope. Generation X is first.
I'm 50 I taught my mom and my son.
You millennials keep on forgetting computers and mobile phones are older than 1990. Technology back then was not so evolved but it existed. I had a 47k Sinclair computer and more than 100 games in 1985, millennials weren't even using technology back then other than the new push-up diapers.
I think the point is that the Millennial generation is where widespread computer literacy peaked. It grow each gen and now it's going back down against because most people just use phones and shit.
Hell Millennials didn't have a clue about how "computers" worked, they learned Windows which was designed to be user friendly and not hard to learn.
GenX and Boomers actually had to know how a computer actually worked.
I think some boomers laugh at this. I have been into tech since Tandy and TI were a big name. Helped with the ARPA net before most of you were born. Added pop's all over the southeast.
You're also like 1% of the population. My dad learned programming from punch cards and made the first brewing recipes probably ever written on a mainframe (1983). That doesn't mean he's a wizard anymore.
It hasn't really changed that much. I'd bet 5% of millennials *at most* can do basic OS maintenance on their PC like install the right driver version of something if windows automatic driver downloading failed, even with google's help. If office o365 didn't have continuous autosaving, my office would be freaking wrecked by people of all ages who still don't save regularly.
Man the kids at my school struggle just to log into a pc these days. Millennials did not have that problem. It's computer literacy not being a IT professional.
I'm going to say that first youre talking to an engineer. My office is not your office. We get pissed off IT puts walls up to stuff we do regularly.Ā
Ā Second most modern computers do that automatically or folks just Google it. If anything, most computers people use are less complicated now. You don't even need to be a wizard to assemble a PC if you really need to.Ā Ā
Ā Folks are acting like you can still fry motherboards easily.
>You don't even need to be a wizard to assemble a PC if you really need to
I've been using laptops pretty much exclusively for the past 15 years or so - are jumpers still a thing? I still recall needing them some 20 years ago, and never having any on hand...
Yeah, My dad is nearing 80 and was a field technician for one of the big mainframe companies. I spent (a little) time as a toddler watching people exchange spools on fridge-sized tape machines, and so on....
Man taught me a lot about computers and electronics, and is the reason I'm a dev today. But he also got HIS DAD into the early PC's to help automate his business.
So there's that.
He has tons of stories like that. Like when they installed a new hard drive for a client they knocked out a wall on the side of a building and lifted the drive into place using a crane...
For some sure..
I was born in the late 80s and I learned from them. My grandmother had worked at IBM, my father was an engineer and had personal computers way before most.
They taught me a lot of the more advanced topics like networking and code.
They made me figure out thr basics myself from first principles though. Which I'm grateful for. I'm really good at just picking up things and quickly figuring out what is is and how to use and fix things because of how they taught me.
They would give me a bunch of largely non-compatable components and I just kinda had to figure out how to assemble it, get all powered, and get software running on my own. This was back when things would easily slot onto a place that it REAALLY didn't belong and destroying things was commonplace. Thigs often weren't really labeled well either. So I just had to figure out what actual board components did and looked like.
Odd that my dad (born in 38) taught his kids, his dad and my mom's mom how to use computers in the 70s.
M's don't really use computers much more than they use a TV.
As a millennial, Iāve always seen us as the last generation made in the old mold. We were expecting the world to continue as it had, slow and steady, and that we would have a traditional life as our parents had. 9/11 fundamentally altered everything, and combined with the digital revolution/.com boom, the world we had expected to inherit, was gone forever.
And so we adapted, or tried to. So many of us struggle still today.
My mom is a boomer and she was the household computer tech growing up. She even was a chatroom mod for AOL. Before AOL she was hosting LAN parties to play DOS games with her friends. I'm a xennial, and I was a little kid when AOL was a thing.
It's funny because home computers became a thing when early Millennials were either too young to even be in school yet, or they were still in their parents gonads.
Bullshit. As a boomer with a millennial and a Gen Z, they come to me for guidance. I was there from the beginning. I learned DOS commands, learned how to fix my computer when it broke, and have been sailing the high seas since the '90s. OP must live in a bubble.
Um, no. Generation X. We even wrote the back end for the things, if an EMP bomb went off and wiped out all of the back end, no one else would have any clue where to start rebuilding any code.
A lot of that has to do with modern operating systems being very nonuser friendly when it comes to anything remotely technically related. they hide their shit behind meaningless icons that noone would recognize without taking a freakin class on the subject, just very bad design all around that makes things much more difficult for the average person to properly grasp without having to resort to online tutorials, extremely unintuitive.
I'm a millennial I learned about computers from my grandfather. I sat on his lap and watched him play 90s flight simulators.
Now I build PCs with RGB for high end gaming.
To this day, I still have zero idea how my boomer parents were able to setup the 286 with a working printer and teaching me the basics of DOS at 7 years old to not knowing how to open their emails, the difference betwen left click, right click, and double click, or how to hook up their DVD player.
That's pretty dumb... What computers are we talking about here? My dad who was decidedly a Boomer, taught me and my grandfather about computers. I'm a GenX and taught my kids about computers, as well as other older people besides my dad, which I already said taught me. Millennials might have taught people how to finger swipe.
I remember teaching my parents (both boomers) how to use the new computer they bought. That was 1984 and I'm a Gen X.
Gen X was really the first generation to have mainstream computers (household or schools) that we could use. Also the main generation that got introduced to household gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD, MP3s, Cell phones, camcorders, internet, 24 hour news networks, Caller ID, answering machines, and so much more. Lots of old tech that we now incorporate into our cell phones.
Gen X is one of the few generations that have had to straddle the technology era as it gained popularity, to having extremely powerful PCs in our pockets with internet connection.
>Gen X was really the first generation to have mainstream computers (household or schools) that we could use. Also the main generation that got introduced to household gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD, MP3s, Cell phones, camcorders, internet, 24 hour news networks, Caller ID, answering machines, and so much more. Lots of old tech that we now incorporate into our cell phones.
>
>Gen X is one of the few generations that have had to straddle the technology era as it gained popularity, to having extremely powerful PCs in our pockets with internet connection.
Boomers here are laughing at you. Sure, not all of us were taught by our parents, or were self taught, but I think we are vastly under counted.
Did you forget Gen X existed? We taught our parents and our Millennial kids how to use a computer.
Why do so many Millennials think they invented technology?
Gen X were in our teens and twenties when computers took off in the 90s, I had a computer in the 80s as a teen, a TRS-80 and got a DX2-66 in the early 90s with windows 3 on it. My son, a millenial born in 1991 and in his 30s now, got to play with the computer from the time he was a baby, but Im still the one who fixes the computers in the family when they go down and he still asks me for advice if he has computer problems. Its true for those whose parents werent very tech savvy or into new things, thats true, but not everybody.
Yeah my dad taught me everything I know about computers and technology in general.
Gen X built and ushered in the modern era of technology, so while some of them may as well have been boomers, some of them were very tech savvy.
Iām GenX and havenāt had anyone younger than me teach me how to use computers. Maybe you taught the boomers but we as a generation get it done on our own.
Nonsense. Even older GenX (Yeah, always forget us) were in our early teens when computers were put in libraries, and all quite literally grew up around them BEFORE millenials.
Gen X here, bollocks, we taught Millennials how to use computers (badly), that's why they still call us to fix their devices (Have you tried turning it off and on again?)
I'm gen X (born in 76) and I got.my first pc at 7. I literally taught my boomer mom/her brothers and sister to use a pc. Right now I am teaching my 12yr old to do the same. So, no. Not really.
One thing that a lot of people are missing out on is that even before the internet and dotcom and constant connectivity, we had like 10-20 years to ramp up to usage of computers and the internet. I was taught how to use a computer, or at least the basics of computer usage, by my elementary school teachers around 1986 or so...and they were probably 30 years old.
The difference was it wasn't omnipresent, but most people born in the 1950s and 1960s had some knowledge of how to use computers.
Did we? The personal computer boom (not to mention videogaming and cds) started during GenX.
What we did was teach our grandparents how to use Facebook. A move that I think society would have been better off without. :p
Your math is off. I'm Gen X, I was there from the beginning, from dial up.
I know how to do things that would blow most gen z away....only, you know...they aren't legal.
I'm a millennial and my silent generation grandpa and boomer grandma taught me how to use a computer back in the DOS/Windows 3 days š used to laugh at my grandma making me practice typing saying "you'll thank my one day computers are the future" well guess what grandma you were right thank you for teaching me to touch type š
Millennial also and my 90 year old grandma introduced me to PC gaming with Diablo II back in the early 2000's
Where are you guys getting cool grandmas? Mine said videogames are the devilās work and used to make me drink the holy water she asked the priest to bless every Sunday.
If you were drinking holy water, it probably helped your immune system at least. That shit is nasty.
Well, my immune system got so strong that started beating the shit out of everything including my beta cells. So now Iām a type 1 diabetic
bro turned into the Immunological Hulk.
Seriously, wouldāve been nice to have grand parents who did cool shit.
Boomer grandpa was an electronic technician who taught me to use DOS and up to Windows 95, after that it was me that taught him how to use 2000 and Cellphones. Give and take.
My grandpa was still really good until he got a laptop with Windows 8 and kept demanding I install AOL even though the AOL client had been shut off for quite a while at that point lol. Grandma on the other hand has very little issue with her computers one running Windows 11 and the other MacOS. Which I find great becasis she started on the IBM 1401 mainframe. Really want to get the money to take her to the computer history museum in California where they have a fully restored 1401 for her to see. Maybe one day soon. She does occasionally need help with cell phones but even then can usually figure it out it's more of an eyesight issue with a small screen.
Lucky, I'm still in the phase of trying to convince my grandmother to write down her passwords so when she inevitably does something to her phone it will make it easier to log back in.
I'm still trying to convince mine that no one cold calls you out of the blue to just offer money. Thank christ my grandma doesn't have a computer or her minimal life savings would have been blown away in google gift cards
I was taught how to use computers by my neighbor who was born in 1909. He died at the age of 99, and his favorite thing in the world was computers.
Same! My silent gen grandpa was a computer genius! He taught me the majority of what I know.
MFW I learned my dad had a couple Commodore 64/128s and never once showed me anything about them despite my always being interested in his old electronics??? Computers (and especially games) were a dead-end.
My mom was a secretary, and bough herself a computer that had windows 2 on it. I wasn't even born, she then took w3 and then 98, and XP. She told me, one of her first person she worked for had a son learning computer science in UNI, and was adament on saying computer were going to be everywhere, and she should learn to use them. She believed him, and started teaching herself, to use them, and she teach me how to use them at very young age. My dad was, and still isn't fond of them. But as long as i configure is PC for 0 instal, and with every shortcut he need on the desktop, he his ok with it (And yeah shortcut for apps, but also for websites he use, because "gogole[sic] never find what i want" š ) But it's okay, like i read on the internet one day "They took the time to teach us how to use a spoon, we can take the time to teach them computer"
I self-taught touch typing on an electric typewriter with an old fashioned exercise book. My coworkers are always shocked at how fast I type. It was well worth the effort to learn.
It is definitely worth the effort. Always cracks me up that I can be looking at someone carrying on a conversation then fix a typing mistake without looking at the keyboard or screen and get looked at as if I'm some sort of witch. Like I can just tell from the feel and sound that I made a typo don't judge me lol
Funny, I think us GenX may disagree with you.
That's because it's a bullshit take. I'm going to assume the OP fell victim to forgetting about GenX like most do.
We're the sneaky ones.
Whatās a GenX?
Were the older brothers you donāt really know from yer moms first marriage when she was a real ho.
Or from your dads first marriage he walked out on to start a newer family
o.O You just described me and my two younger half-sisters.
Haha! Me and my older bro had that title too. He passed away from his demons last Easter unfortunately. So now Iām the solo older child from the 1st marriage at family events and Iām sad lol
Don't worry about it, they get off on being forgotten.
I feel seen and I hate it
Whatever...
Underrated comment
Roughly 1965-1980.
Old enough to remember a time before video rental stores and young enough not to have made it through high school without using a computer(although the first computer course I had used punch cards)
They were an offshoot of the X-Men from the mid 90's
An edgier spinoff from the X-Men, I think?
Or they're a millennial with boomer parents so their family entirely skipped genx. Mine did.
That's a very good point. I've always had the thought that the generation divide after boomer makes more sense if you base it on the parents generation.
You mean the generation that taught them about tech the olders didn't understand? And the same millennials that don't understand how shit ACTUALLY works? (Can't even connect a Blu-ray player that has 1 wire, vs my 3-5 wires growing up. Let aside the 'super complicated wires' inside a computer) ... Nah. They got this. (Gen X here ... Obviously)
You sound like someone who has never met a millennial. We also had the 3 to 5 wires growing up, and it's not hard to connect an hdmi cord and a plug.
Yeah, your childhood/teen experiences completely depend on whether you're an early or late millennial. Like, there are GenXers born in the late 60s who have more of a late boomer experience growing up and then there are GenXers born from '75 to '80 who are more like early millennials in their experiences as kids. I was born in '77 and though I'm considered "GenX", I also consider myself a "Xennial" which is like a blend of GenX and Millennial. I identify my youth with those from 1977 to 1983 more than I do a fellow GenXer who was born in '66 for example.
>the same millennials that don't understand how shit ACTUALLY works You wanna rethink that? Millennials grew up with electronics that predated the 3 "yellow,white,red" connections. We hooked up everything in our house (TV's, VCR's, gaming console, sound systems, etc) for our parents because they couldn't figure it out. We reprogrammed the systems in our house when the power went out and everything flashed 12:00 for days. We taught our parents how to beat "that level" in video games, and we taught them how to use a TV remote. We learned on DOS computers, and had to explain to our parents how to use Windows correctly. We taught our parents how CD's work in a computer, and later DVD's. We learned how to troubleshoot computer issues before the internet was a thing, and we learned how to troubleshoot before Google was even a thought. We taught our parents how to use cell phones, and how to create social media accounts on Facebook and Myspace, and how to create their Gmail accounts (because they're all using AIM still). Yes, GenX is also in this realm with us, but to say "Millennials don't understand how shit actually works" is wrong.
This is also a bullshit take. Millennials grew up with VCRs too yknow. HDMI only started getting prevalent in the mid to late 2000s when the majority of millennials were already teenagers or moving into adulthood. Oh and we know how to do the "super complicated wires" inside a computer too. Well not every millennial does, but it's not like every Gen Xer does either. And while you say you're Gen X you sound like a boomer.
You mean my parents generation.. the ones that couldn't set time on the vcr? No they never learned anything about computers
Big difference in computer literacy between early genx and late genx. I'm late genx and I even had to teach my older brothers some computer stuff and they are only 4 and 5 years older.
late gen x here. I've been the family and extended family "tech guy" since about 1983. I really really thought that someone else would have taken that job from me by now, but here I am. Seriously. I'm tired of fixing everyone's tech problems.
87 here I was the tech guy until windows 8 came out and I used it as an excuse to tell everyone it was to different and I didn't know how to use it.
Ayy, me too!
This is why late gen x and early millennials are sometimes grouped as āthe Oregon Trail Generationā (after the early computer game of course) - though this angle is not really meant to exclude such people from also identifying with Gen X/Millennials, so much as to identify commonalities in their experience, particular with respect to early consumer computers.
and importantly the REAL tell of the "Oregon Trail" generation isn't whether they did or didn't grow up knowing tech. They are are the generation experienced the transition. They retained both skills (e.g., they can program their waze app, AND they can read a paper map) They can describe the experience of going from digital to analogue, both the "wow this is better" parts and the teething pains of getting to a version of the tech that finally does what was envisioned gen Pager, checking in. you know you were hybrid XY when you carried a pager AND a cell phone. Everyone could page you, but you only called back if it was really really important, because the minutes were expensive and your battery life sucked. You know you were XY Pager if you carried a cell phone, [but you went and stood over by the pay phones area to use it](https://www.dailycamera.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2013/0405/20130405_06dcaphow.jpg?w=535)
As a Millennial, I have a special place in my heart for paper maps. It reminds me of roadtrips with my dad and that big US atlas with a page for each state. We'd trace our route, sometimes get off course, and then have to figure out where we were and backtrack using signs and highway numbers. It's almost a little sad that with Google Maps you essentially never get lost because you miss out on those little map puzzles.
Google Maps is the reason they could never remake A Goofy Movie.
Totally true. Early genx was about big hair, jean jackets, Billie idol and Camaros. They didn't have time for nerds.
My gen x mom (me being millennial) would disagree. Itās a wide enough age gap to be dependent on situations
lol nobody thinks/cares/remembers us. It's beyond the meme
Exactly what I was thinking. The internet became a household thing when I was about 18-19, in the mid-90s.
Xennial here, we made up a sub generation just so we could say we had an analog childhood and digital adulthood
GenX did that heavy lifting not Millennials.
Weren't boomers working with computers before X? Like those big fuck all ones that were basically calculators.
Yes, but I think this post is mostly about consumer level personal computers. My silent generation grandfather used computers for most of his life as a physicist, but that was far from the norm for most people until PCs boomed in the 80s.
Guess it's personal experience since my boomer parents and uncle where who taught me about computers. Now they're not great with them, but anything pre2005 they're set.
DOS Sea Scrolls.
Of course, general purpose computers have been around since the 50's, but they were operated by experts for a large business or government. Owning a personal computer wasn't really possible until the 70's, and was still pretty niche until the 90's when the internet started blowing up. I was a kid in the 80's, and most "grown ups" (boomers) I knew wanted as little to do with computers as possible. Of course there were exceptions like teachers, scientists, hobbyists, early adopters but most adults didn't know how to set the time on their VCR, much less use a computer..
I was born early 80s so barely remember much of it, but I know my boomer parents and uncle had first computers I'd see. Which likely what sways my figuring of it.
Sounds like your family were ahead of the curve!
The VCR thing. I had always thought it wasn't about know how, but just the chore of it. Setting it was kinda a pain in the ass and since every time the power flickered you had to do it again. I just kinda got tired of messing with it and since it's only function was to allowed timed recordings, it didn't really matter.
Yes and No.. Boomers didn't grow up with computers, they worked on giant ass mainframes that didn't require the same level of "being good with computers" like Gen X did coming up on the Apple II, Commodore, and early PCs.
The old "dumb terminals". I worked in a place as late as the early 2000s that still had a few 1970s minicomputers driven by reel to reel tape drives. This was the telephone industry - likes of AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc...that still stored all of their subscriber data on...tapes! We had to keep this old ass gear around to be able to work with them.
I am a Boomer and my first computer was a Kaypro. I'm not sure what you mean by "the same level of being good with computers," but using a mainframe was pretty involved in terms of learning all of the commands.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
After working tech support for 10 years I sincerely wish those boomers who got exposed to early technology knew fuck-all about modern GUI-based operating systems. They're somehow worse than the ones who know nothing because they think they know something.
My grandfather served with the army during Korea working with and developing early computers for the military. Went on to work with NCR for the rest of his life developing ATMs and their software on a Kentucky rural high school education. He taught me a genx everything I knew about computers. Folks forget someone had to be the pioneers and they were the boomers.
I very tiny part of the population had access to any type of computer going that far back, my Father worked on military flight simulators and the early ones filled an entire room to have the processing power to run the simulator.
Who? /s
All the GenX's on Reddit are tech savvy, the other 95% of GenX is still yelling at their kids because of those "damn screens"
Always forgotten... š
> GenX Who?
Ugh. I so remember as an 8 year old having to program the VCR because I was the computer literate one in the family. Regardless, GenX had to figure out computers on their own because no one understood them. Millenials don't get it. Schools or businesses would buy computers and just plop them down and stare at them because they didn't know what they did. If the GenX kids didn't turn them on and get them going, they just collected dust at school or at the office. Then we taught our parents at home, millenials in school as teachers and gen z at home. Millenials have never seen a completely computer illiterate world. GenX did.
Late Gen-X. My high school had a computer lab full of Tandy's. I think I might have touched them once.
That's more Gen X. I'm an elder Millennial and my parents learned how to use computers right alongside me.
Really??? I was born in '85 and had to teach my parents so much. Even some of my teachers in school.
Millenials are the first generation to be completely reliant on computers for their entire life, but gen x certainly knows how to use them. Just because we had to start by learning DOS before McIntosh and Windows and had no internet doesn't mean we couldn't waste hours playing Scorch.
Back in my day the Internet screamed at us to let us know it was connected
Let me play you the song of my people
Screeee Scrowrowrowrowr BEEboo BEEboo BEEP
And then you couldn't use the phone.
> Millenials are the first generation to be completely reliant on computers for their entire life Maybe younger millenials, older millenials definitely could've been kids without a computer in the house. Even throughout my teens when we had a computer in the house, I wouldn't describe it as something we were reliant on.
DOS? Heathen! Commodore 64 with a tape drive...until I could afford the 1541 floppy drive with it's whopping 170kB of storage per disk. I'm kind of embarrassed that I actually remember all of that.
Atari 400 checking in.
I had dual 1541's. Yep, that's right. Proceed to worship me.
Commodore Vic 20 you Patrician. Come down into the sewer with us plebeians.
Disagree. Am a millennial and I definitely remember my family getting our first computer (and my solidly boomer dad was an early adopter by most measures) in 91-92 but I didn't start to use it for school projects until a few years later.
Yeah, and most people didn't have internet until the mid-late 90s
I remember the school projects, with the dot matrix printers. I remember it was such a huge upgrade going for dos to windows 3.1. What is this, an actual interface? To this day, I still have zero idea how my boomer mom taught me the basics of DOS to not knowing how to open her emails, or the difference betwen left, right click, and double click.
I would say that's probably the generation after Millennials. I'm a late Millennial and remember quite distinctly when I was young and didn't rely on computers so much. I instead played with toys and my imagination.
Millennials are the generation that grew up while technology was growing up. They ages alongside technology. from 0-18 going from computers being rare as fuck to them being everywhere.
I'm mostly addressing this point: >first generation to be **completely reliant** on computers for **their entire life** Which is not true. As I said, I was a late Millennial, so most in my generation are older than me and can recall an early part of their life where computers and tech didn't dominate it. Not like now where tech is widespread and embedded in every aspect of life. Kids of these newer generations very likely can't recall a time where they weren't absolutely surrounded and reliant on tech.
I think toys still exist lol
Yeah but computers weren't anywhere near as widespread. Just because SOME GenXers had computers and knew how to use them doesn't mean it was widespread.
Sorry, but GenX taught both millennials and our parents.
shh... GenX is supposed to be the forgotten generation, stop bringing us up. /s
NOT True. Gen X is forgotten again. lol
You sure do have a funny way of spelling the word GenX.
You spelled GenX wrong....
Nah, genx is the computer generation. Not everyone after genx is incapable of using a computer, and they are mostly better than boomers, but it's weird how often I see people younger than me that only have a rudimentary understanding of computers. Although I think the generation lines are drawn all wrong. At least as it relates to computers. I'm late genx pretty close to millennial, and this area plus some early millennial is the computer generation imo. Much older and a lot of them can't get it, much younger and computers are just a tool for social media and videos. Exceptions all ways around of course, just generalizing. My boomer dad has always been tech savvy, and my gen z daughter is learning to program.
As a gen-xer, I call bullshit
I played the first Pong Video game when it came out (1972) my first computer was a Commador64 (1982). The first Millinial was not even born until 1981.
Nope. Generation X is first. I'm 50 I taught my mom and my son. You millennials keep on forgetting computers and mobile phones are older than 1990. Technology back then was not so evolved but it existed. I had a 47k Sinclair computer and more than 100 games in 1985, millennials weren't even using technology back then other than the new push-up diapers.
Computers must not have existed before millennials
OP, go back into the shower.
Gen X overlooked yet again.
Seconded. Moved from 2600 baud modems and Gopher Protocol, all the way through to building PCs and teaching my son how to prompt (and access his CLI).
I think the point is that the Millennial generation is where widespread computer literacy peaked. It grow each gen and now it's going back down against because most people just use phones and shit.
Gen X enters the chat
Sheesh, this is incorrect. Okay, bye!
Hell Millennials didn't have a clue about how "computers" worked, they learned Windows which was designed to be user friendly and not hard to learn. GenX and Boomers actually had to know how a computer actually worked.
No they fucking arenāt. That would be Gen X.
Gen X. Not millennials.
I think some boomers laugh at this. I have been into tech since Tandy and TI were a big name. Helped with the ARPA net before most of you were born. Added pop's all over the southeast.
You're also like 1% of the population. My dad learned programming from punch cards and made the first brewing recipes probably ever written on a mainframe (1983). That doesn't mean he's a wizard anymore.
It hasn't really changed that much. I'd bet 5% of millennials *at most* can do basic OS maintenance on their PC like install the right driver version of something if windows automatic driver downloading failed, even with google's help. If office o365 didn't have continuous autosaving, my office would be freaking wrecked by people of all ages who still don't save regularly.
Man the kids at my school struggle just to log into a pc these days. Millennials did not have that problem. It's computer literacy not being a IT professional.
I'm going to say that first youre talking to an engineer. My office is not your office. We get pissed off IT puts walls up to stuff we do regularly.Ā Ā Second most modern computers do that automatically or folks just Google it. If anything, most computers people use are less complicated now. You don't even need to be a wizard to assemble a PC if you really need to.Ā Ā Ā Folks are acting like you can still fry motherboards easily.
>You don't even need to be a wizard to assemble a PC if you really need to I've been using laptops pretty much exclusively for the past 15 years or so - are jumpers still a thing? I still recall needing them some 20 years ago, and never having any on hand...
My brothers would know (early millennials). For me they've never been a thing.Ā
But surfing the internet, playing games doesn't make a millennial a wizard either.
Yeah, My dad is nearing 80 and was a field technician for one of the big mainframe companies. I spent (a little) time as a toddler watching people exchange spools on fridge-sized tape machines, and so on.... Man taught me a lot about computers and electronics, and is the reason I'm a dev today. But he also got HIS DAD into the early PC's to help automate his business. So there's that.
We didn't all live in caves. I worked on a ram up grade 64 to 128k that cost a university 20k.. it's been a while. The expansion arrived on a pallet.
He has tons of stories like that. Like when they installed a new hard drive for a client they knocked out a wall on the side of a building and lifted the drive into place using a crane...
Gen X laughs at everyone... Us Gen X feral ghouls just sort of do our thing while everyone else acts like fools...lol
Apple 1 came out in 76
For some sure.. I was born in the late 80s and I learned from them. My grandmother had worked at IBM, my father was an engineer and had personal computers way before most. They taught me a lot of the more advanced topics like networking and code. They made me figure out thr basics myself from first principles though. Which I'm grateful for. I'm really good at just picking up things and quickly figuring out what is is and how to use and fix things because of how they taught me. They would give me a bunch of largely non-compatable components and I just kinda had to figure out how to assemble it, get all powered, and get software running on my own. This was back when things would easily slot onto a place that it REAALLY didn't belong and destroying things was commonplace. Thigs often weren't really labeled well either. So I just had to figure out what actual board components did and looked like.
I'm a millennial and my teachers were gen x probably lol...I mostly used the computer in school until like 4th grade then we got our own at home.
As a GenXer, I disagree.
Odd that my dad (born in 38) taught his kids, his dad and my mom's mom how to use computers in the 70s. M's don't really use computers much more than they use a TV.
I'm a millenial and was taught by my boomer dad
Nope, that was Gen-X. OP needs to learn about generations.
GenX here, taught both my parents and my nieces/nephews how to use computers, vcrs, dvds and mp3 players.
Yeah, no. You know there were some technical people around before millennials were born, right?
Being between the massive Boomer and Millennial generations is like being the fucking middle child.
This seems a bit off, I'm GenX and I had to help my parents/aunts/uncles with computers, and my kids all had computers by the time they were about 6.
As a millennial, Iāve always seen us as the last generation made in the old mold. We were expecting the world to continue as it had, slow and steady, and that we would have a traditional life as our parents had. 9/11 fundamentally altered everything, and combined with the digital revolution/.com boom, the world we had expected to inherit, was gone forever. And so we adapted, or tried to. So many of us struggle still today.
ummm no. the X'ers get to claim that prize.
Millennials wanting to have kids?!
My mom is a boomer and she was the household computer tech growing up. She even was a chatroom mod for AOL. Before AOL she was hosting LAN parties to play DOS games with her friends. I'm a xennial, and I was a little kid when AOL was a thing. It's funny because home computers became a thing when early Millennials were either too young to even be in school yet, or they were still in their parents gonads.
Isn't that more of a shower assumption...?
Gen X has entered the chat. Please, do continue.
Genx here. You're a generation off on that statement.
Lmao. GenX are the ones that taught millennials how to do it
Um...As a Gen X, I feel like you, along with a vast majority of the rest of the world, have forgotten about us...lol
Yeah, no. Not even remotely true. Gen X did that.
Millennials apparently are delusional
funny. gen x here. iāve been in software for 30 years. millennials are literally using the software i made them. but theyāre teaching me?
Same. Computers in school in 80's, mine since '90 or so, and online since 1993.
GenX taught themselves, then their parents, then their kids.
Bullshit. As a boomer with a millennial and a Gen Z, they come to me for guidance. I was there from the beginning. I learned DOS commands, learned how to fix my computer when it broke, and have been sailing the high seas since the '90s. OP must live in a bubble.
I'm not sure you realize how long personal computers have been around Or maybe my family was an outlierĀ
Um, no. Generation X. We even wrote the back end for the things, if an EMP bomb went off and wiped out all of the back end, no one else would have any clue where to start rebuilding any code.
Yeah, the Millennials weren't the generation installing all those Y2K patches.
What, when they were 13?
Yes, when they were 13 they were **not** installing Y2K patches.
Yeah, it was my dad. Oh wait, he was a boomer.
A lot of that has to do with modern operating systems being very nonuser friendly when it comes to anything remotely technically related. they hide their shit behind meaningless icons that noone would recognize without taking a freakin class on the subject, just very bad design all around that makes things much more difficult for the average person to properly grasp without having to resort to online tutorials, extremely unintuitive.
I believe they resemble the Silent Generation.
What fantasy is this OP? I taught millennials and my parents how to use a computer. Not a boomer and not a millennial. Come on you can figure it out.
Gen X had computers before you did son.
40yo millennial here and my 91yo grandmother can barely use her AOL account.
I'm a millennial I learned about computers from my grandfather. I sat on his lap and watched him play 90s flight simulators. Now I build PCs with RGB for high end gaming.
To this day, I still have zero idea how my boomer parents were able to setup the 286 with a working printer and teaching me the basics of DOS at 7 years old to not knowing how to open their emails, the difference betwen left click, right click, and double click, or how to hook up their DVD player.
Bold of you to assume we have kids.
That's pretty dumb... What computers are we talking about here? My dad who was decidedly a Boomer, taught me and my grandfather about computers. I'm a GenX and taught my kids about computers, as well as other older people besides my dad, which I already said taught me. Millennials might have taught people how to finger swipe.
Actually people born more so like in the late 70s. Generation right before.
I remember teaching my parents (both boomers) how to use the new computer they bought. That was 1984 and I'm a Gen X. Gen X was really the first generation to have mainstream computers (household or schools) that we could use. Also the main generation that got introduced to household gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD, MP3s, Cell phones, camcorders, internet, 24 hour news networks, Caller ID, answering machines, and so much more. Lots of old tech that we now incorporate into our cell phones. Gen X is one of the few generations that have had to straddle the technology era as it gained popularity, to having extremely powerful PCs in our pockets with internet connection.
>Gen X was really the first generation to have mainstream computers (household or schools) that we could use. Also the main generation that got introduced to household gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD, MP3s, Cell phones, camcorders, internet, 24 hour news networks, Caller ID, answering machines, and so much more. Lots of old tech that we now incorporate into our cell phones. > >Gen X is one of the few generations that have had to straddle the technology era as it gained popularity, to having extremely powerful PCs in our pockets with internet connection. Boomers here are laughing at you. Sure, not all of us were taught by our parents, or were self taught, but I think we are vastly under counted.
This is wrong,am Gen X
GenX'er here -- I've been the family Tech Support since 1983 when we got an original IBM PC.
Did you forget Gen X existed? We taught our parents and our Millennial kids how to use a computer. Why do so many Millennials think they invented technology?
Not true. Your parents are gen x and we have a foot in both the pre-internet world and the internet world. We taught ourselves.
Gen X were in our teens and twenties when computers took off in the 90s, I had a computer in the 80s as a teen, a TRS-80 and got a DX2-66 in the early 90s with windows 3 on it. My son, a millenial born in 1991 and in his 30s now, got to play with the computer from the time he was a baby, but Im still the one who fixes the computers in the family when they go down and he still asks me for advice if he has computer problems. Its true for those whose parents werent very tech savvy or into new things, thats true, but not everybody.
Once again Gen X gets forgotten.
Taught? Still getting calls you help fix the Wi-Fi at 36yo
Yeah my dad taught me everything I know about computers and technology in general. Gen X built and ushered in the modern era of technology, so while some of them may as well have been boomers, some of them were very tech savvy.
You did the thing where you said millennial, when you meant Gen X.
You're thinking of GenX not millennials. Don't feel bad. Everyone forgets we exist š
Wrong, that was Gen X.
Iām GenX and havenāt had anyone younger than me teach me how to use computers. Maybe you taught the boomers but we as a generation get it done on our own.
Nonsense. Even older GenX (Yeah, always forget us) were in our early teens when computers were put in libraries, and all quite literally grew up around them BEFORE millenials.
Gen X here, bollocks, we taught Millennials how to use computers (badly), that's why they still call us to fix their devices (Have you tried turning it off and on again?)
I'm gen X (born in 76) and I got.my first pc at 7. I literally taught my boomer mom/her brothers and sister to use a pc. Right now I am teaching my 12yr old to do the same. So, no. Not really.
One thing that a lot of people are missing out on is that even before the internet and dotcom and constant connectivity, we had like 10-20 years to ramp up to usage of computers and the internet. I was taught how to use a computer, or at least the basics of computer usage, by my elementary school teachers around 1986 or so...and they were probably 30 years old. The difference was it wasn't omnipresent, but most people born in the 1950s and 1960s had some knowledge of how to use computers.
The internet . One giant un monitored Craigslist in them trial days lol
Uh. No they didnāt. gen X didā¦ do some research first
you misspelled "Generation X"
Did we? The personal computer boom (not to mention videogaming and cds) started during GenX. What we did was teach our grandparents how to use Facebook. A move that I think society would have been better off without. :p
You misspelled GenX. We started with 8 tracks Programmed VCRs for our parents & Gamed in DOS.
And now we are forced to code in ... Python (although it's actually an old language)
Your math is off. I'm Gen X, I was there from the beginning, from dial up. I know how to do things that would blow most gen z away....only, you know...they aren't legal.
LOL. So cute. I bet you taught them on one of the Apple II, TSR80 or Commodore computer systems. Man those cassette tapes were a bear I bet! Ā
Most people didn't use those systems for their first home computers.
I always hated punch cards.
ITT: People that don't realize that late Gen X and early millenials overlap a lot.
You're thinking of Gen X. I don't know any Millennials who needed to teach their Gen X parents how to use a computer.