No – it just didn’t exist. Back in the day it was all commercials for lotions and cremes containing jojoba, cocoa butter, and whatever other wrinkle-spackle-of-the-year was in vogue.
[QUOTE]
Retin-A was and still is used as an anti-acne medicine. It was on the market for quite a while before the anti-wrinkle properties were discovered.
The other day I asked my son to load up the video camera for me. It uses the Hi-8 format. The tape comes in a case that works just like a regular cassette tape case. He had never used a cassette so he had a hard time figuring out how it opened. I am old.
And it was Travoltas comback from movies like Grease and Saturday Night Fever which were like 15 years before that!
Screw the pop culture stuff.
I think it’s much more telling that freshmen today likely have always had:
-the Internet
-Cellphones
-Instant messaging
[QUOTE=msmith537Screw the pop culture stuff.
I think it’s much more telling that freshmen today likely have always had:
-the Internet
-Cellphones
-Instant messaging[/QUOTE]
I’d have to say yes and no to that.
Internet: The internet the vast majority of people have come to know and love, being primarily associated with the WorldWide Web, only came about in any significant form in 1992 with the release of NCSA Mosaic. Even then it was a year or two more before public access internet service providers began cropping up in any significant numbers, and SLIP and PPP access (as opposed to dialup shell accounts) made connecting to and using the internet easy and relatively transparent. It might be fair to say, however, that most freshment probably don’t know what a BBS is.
Cellphones: I dunno about kids. They were around as portable devices (instead of clunky boxes you bolted to the center console of your car) toward the end of the 80s and onward, but they were far too expensive (both to buy and to subscribe to) for kids to have them unless they were of affluent stock. I didn’t start seeing kids with cell phones as a regular fixture of city streets and malls until 1997 or 1998, a year or two after the Motorola StarTAC set the standard for small portable devices. Even then they didn’t really seem to becme ubiquitous until around the turn of the century.
Instant Messaging: Not really. This only became a popular thing around 1996/7, when ICQ became all the rage. Heck, when I signed up with ICQ I had a 6-digit UIN, and that was in mid-1997, indicating that it didn’t even have a million users yet.
This always bugs me. I’m 19 right now. I was 12 before I ever used the Internet (and only had a passing knowledge of computers before that - some Windows 3.1 and DOS games). Cellphones? My mom still has one we call ‘the Brick’ which she reserved for emergencies. Back then it was amazing, because she was one of the first people in our area to get one. I never had one until I was 16. Instant messaging? Never heard of it until I was 13. Don’t have text messaging on my cellphone, or Internet access.
Satellite TV? Wasn’t a reality for me until I was 12 or so. I grew up on a farm, so cable was out of the question, and until then, it was two channel farmervision for me.
In my communications class last semester, the teacher read us an article about the digital divide - how people my age were the first to grow up with technology and internalized it since birth. We apparently learn how to use computers faster because of this, so we have an advantage over older people. All I can say is, the only advantage I had over older people in learning computers was that I wasn’t afraid to try things. My parents’ generation is scared as hell of even using a menu item they’ve never used before, for fear of causing a nuclear meltdown or something. I have to tell them that short of physically causing damage, there is nothing you can do on a computer that cannot be undone. I don’t ever expect them to start messing around with the BIOS - I want them to explore the Firefox menus and not be afraid of figuring things out on their own.
Seven years ago, eh? I have web pages that are four years older than that.
Some of your parent’s generation. Others of us were exploring the computer field back in the eighties. But even then, I never experienced the internet until around 1992, through a community-college account. (Until then, only universities, high-level research places, and commercial entities like IBM had access, and I wasn’t at university. )
Now, my father’s generation, on the other hand… my father even yet has never seen the internet. He only saw a web page because I showed one to him on the screen of my phone.
I teach high school, and I wouldn’t be even mildly surprised anymore at almost anything a kid doesn’t know. There are families that never had education, and the kids have gotten through on social promotion and doing the absolute bare minimum. Remember what the population of a high school is: everyone who isn’t so retarded or mentally ill that he has to be put in a special class. That goes pretty far down.
The DDS would come up seriously about 6 times when it actually mattered, and if I had to find a certain book in the stacks and didn’t understand the DDS, I would just ask someone for help. I’m not learning some lame geekoid system for stupid books when I get someone to do it for me. I’ve got people to see and iPods to listen to. Screw that.
What was scary to me was meeting a young man through some hockey friends. We both graduated from the same small college (LaGrange College). He majored in Computer Science. When I started as a freshman, they were just installing the computer lab - with mainframes bigger than my bed.
Get off my lawn, and don’t let your dog shit on it!
I think this is completely on point. I’ve decided that one of the reasons you have 6 year-olds who are better at computers is because they aren’t afraid to fail. They spend much of their time failing, and being corrected by someone, so one more thing doesn’t really faze them.
My 60+ dad will ask me things that just boggle me. Instead of just fooling around with a program and seeing what it will do even on a basic level for 20 minutes, he’ll ask me how to do it. The other part is that he insists on using the AOL software, which now is such a small part of the net lanscape that he’s the only person I know who uses it, and I can’t help him, usually.
My dad’s the same way. He made it through the 80s and 90s watching me work my way up the evolution of home computers with nary an interest in them – until they became capable of doing things that fell upon his particular interests (photography, audio editing). Once I got him a computer around the turn of the century – along with several books on how to use them, mind you – he began to pick up the basics. Mostly from calling me up and asking me how to do something. Repeatedly.
He’s learned a fair bit about photo editing and the like, so he can do the basic stuff without calling me up too often, but any time he wants to do a particular thing he’s never done before I can expect to field another tech support call. And of course for reasons I have yet to fathom he has all kinds of problems with computers – this or that doesn’t work or isn’t doing what it’s supposed to – which means I have to go over there and fix it. I don’t know what it is he does that causes these things to happen, but they’re the same sort of things that go wrong with computers whose owners don’t know much about their use.
My father just turned 58. Of course, computers aren’t a problem for him seeing as how he did the programming needed for his dissertation using PUNCH CARDS. (He’s still got them somewhere, but I have no idea where he’d stick them in these days.) And yes, us kids sometimes give him a slightly hard time about it. (I mean, seriously, punch cards?)
I think the Beloit list has lost something over the years. I agree with a lot of the comments posted that whoever is doing it these days doesn’t really have a clue.
There was a “no smoking” light alongside the seatbelt light. The pre-landing spiel the stewardess (and they were called “stewardesses” back then, not “flight attendants”) had included “extinguish all smoking materials” along with “fasten your seatbelts and return your tray to the upright position”.
The Hindenburg - you know, that big zepplin that depended on highly explosive hydrogen gas to stay up in the air - actually had a smoking room on board!
You young’uns just don’t comprehend how pervasive public tobacco use was in Western culture even a generation ago, much less earlier.
It wasn’t that long ago. I clearly remember “stewardess” as part of regular verbiage in the 80s, long before the whole PC movement. In fact, I never understood why the word was regarded as even remotely derogatory such that it inspired the term “flight attendant” except that “stewardess” was gender-specific. But I guess gender specificity was enough to send it into linguistic exile as we moved into the “kinder, gentler nation.”
In defense of geezers: I’ve been working with computers for 35 years (started on punch cards), and I’m sometimes intimidated by my home PC. And I think it’s because documentation is pathetic. There’s a reason why there’s such a booming market in after-market documentation (“XP for Dummies”, etc) – trying to figure out how to use the software that comes with your PC, based on the materials you get when you buy the hardware, is damn ner impossible.
I think you have to take away at least 5 years for those of us who grew up in small towns. Maybe more. When I left my small town in 2003 I was still the only one of my friends with a cell phone.
I learned to type in high school, in the mid-1990s, on a typewriter, because our school did not have computers.
No school I ever went to had air conditioning, so we went half-days at the start and end of the year when it was too hot.
My Jr. High was finally torn down when I was halfway through the 7th grade because of all the asbestos.
I was the only one of my friends with a computer - much less email and instant messaging - until one of my friends got one about 3 months ago. He has already given up on it though because he can’t use it for more than a day or two at a time without getting so crippled with viruses and spyware that he has to take it into the shop.
I’ve never instant messaged with anyone I went to high school with except my brother, who didn’t get a computer until he got out of the USMC in 2002, and even then had NO CLUE how to use one (he’s pretty handy with a computer now, though.)
My wife and I went on myspace awhile back and compared how many registered users my high school (in NC) had versus how many registered users her high school (in MA) had. Even though my school was significantly larger, hers had more than 5 times as many registered users. It seems like the new millenium still hasn’t really caught on in my old hometown.
I expect most small towns would be considerably behind the curve. I’ve been a city slicker most of my life, but I spent a few months in the small town of Seabright, ON, a spacious town situated on Lake Dalrymple just outside of Orillia with sparse housing and completely bereft of such luxuries as streetlights or, in some areas, pavement. The nearest corner store was a 10 minute drive. It was also the nearest store of any kind outside Orillia. At the time (being 1988) I’m quite certain that, between myself and my friend (whom I shared a house with), we were the only two people who had computers. There was a BBS run out of Orillia and membership to it was fairly high for the region (probably on the order of 20-30 people) but we were the only people from Seabright. I think there may have been one or two over in Beaverton, another town much like ours.
We also didn’t have cable TV, or the possibility to get it.
Going further back into the early 80s, I remember being at my grandmother’s in the flea speck town of Fullerton, ON. She lived in a rennovated late 19th century schoolhouse – the kind with the peaked, thatched roof, belfry, one big classroom and a few auxiliary rooms plus a kitchen and a cold cellar. Their phone system must have been a holdover from the 30s or something, because everyone’s phone line was shared by up to four people in the immediate vicinity, and you determined if the phone was meant for you by the way it rang. It was quaint even then.
