When I told a friend that my husband had this brand new thing called an email address at hotmail she thought hotmail was spelled hot male and wondered why he was bragging about himself.
I’m a Gen-Xer in my early 40s, and I distinctly remember the various stages that I was introduced to the internet.
I got my first email address in college in the late '80s. About 1990, we were first allowed to send and receive email beyond the university campus.
I also discovered Usenet about that time. However, you were blocked from posting unless you filled out some B.S. form (and got it co-signed by a professor) justifying why you felt it necessary to be able to post. (The university was still getting used to the internet, and didn’t want anything sent out that might discredit the university.) I can still find some of my posts from that time–they have my full actual name and contact info on my signature–we weren’t as concerned with privacy or identity theft then.
The next big thing was the web. I distinctly remember one of my grad school profs taking class time to show us all the capability of basic search engines and their applicability to research. This was in 1997.
Phones - you could thump them and get money out! :eek:
Apparently
Of course not. They’re not characters so much as caricatures. I view it as a…fable? No, that’s got animals. Allegory? Nah, that’s not it either. Eh, whatever…it crystallized the zeitgeist in a very entertaining way.
Or, at the very least, provided a narrative for the just-burgeoning 24-hour news cycle to latch onto.
Piffle. I’m 58, and you 40 year olds had it easy. You had UHF, so in a lot of markets you had a lot more than 3 channels. I didn’t when I was growing up, though I lived in NY which had 7.
You probably had color TV. They were expensive and rare when I was a kid.
By the time you were a teenager, movie censorship was kaput. Not so for me. I was in college before the boobies came out in Hollywood film.
You could get a PC at a fairly young age. I already had a PhD in Computer Science before I could buy even a very primitive one. With an actual disk drive. I learned to program in high school on an old computer with 4K of memory on a disk, no assembler, and not even ASCII.
You also probably had a microwave at a fairly young age. If we wanted to heat up coffee, we put it in a pot on the stove and hope we didn’t boil it.
Oh, sorry. I just re-read and realized you were specifically referencing the fear of nuclear war thing as not being accurate.
When I first read the book, I just thought that Coupland was simply fabricating a(n excessive) trait for his characters. Since then, I’ve encountered quite a few people of my (our?) generation that (claimed that they) experienced that fear. Furthermore, I know it’s come up in other SDMB threads.
Weird, IMHO, and not something I felt personally, but some did.
I was like this also -until I got a Droid. That has enough functionality to be useful, and has the great feature of combining my phone and music player. It is especially useful for traffic reports. I don’t use it as a phone anymore than I used to, but I text more now I have a dataplan - and audio texting is actually faster for me than typing, and amazingly accurate.
Born in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration. Computers are the biggest change. Even the Internet pales somewhat with that development, because it’s dependent on computers.
I recall the computers shown in the movies and on TV in the 1960s, those huge monstrosities with what looked like movie reels spinning around, and we thought those were the coolest things ever!
I remember when we got our first color television set to replace the B&W. That was so cool, too!
With a Capt’n Crunch whistle you could do it for free.
Um, when did you live when there weren’t STDs? I’m a young’un but I’ve seen some pretty nasty photos of guys with syphilis from around the Civil War era.
And what years of great sacrifice that required of everyone.
Certainly a unique feat that no other generation has matched.
That’s worse than people had it in the great depression certainly.
I actually sort of thing gen X probably takes too much crap, but after reading this post it makes me think maybe not. If these are the heights of your accomplishments and tribulations…
What, no one mentioned GPS yet? I guess maybe the young’uns don’t really use GPS like they use cell phones, but damn it still amazes me (43).
And I agree pay at the pump rocks, but 24 hour convenience store are cool too. You might not believe it, but the name 7 to 11 actually meant something at one time.
Speaking of pains in the ass, blue laws used to be much more common, and even if there were no blue laws a lot of businesses were closed on Sunday anyway. Even liquor stores.
And for some reason, the phone company (yes, there was only one) had us convinced that long distance cost a hell of a lot of money.
We did have something that kids don’t have today - snow on TV.
I was in high school when the internet made it big, early enough to make the transition smoothly but late enough to really get how lucky I was.
I’ll never forget in college when that enormous blackout occurred, we were all sitting there wondering how we were going to find the the telephone number for X Company without any internet. Finally one of our sharper friends piped up: ‘‘Uh, guys? How about the phone book?’’
:smack: By that point I had seriously forgotten they existed. That was years ago. We don’t have one in this house.
Today there was an older man – maybe 60 or 70 – trying to figure out how to pay for his parking pass at the automated kiosk. He was so bewildered. The guy beside me (roughly my age) helped him through the steps, and when he finally got his pass paid for, he was still lost as to next steps (get in car, swipe ticket, drive away.)
He turned to both of us and said, ‘‘It’s your world now.’’
Poor old man.
I was born in 1981 and I could’ve written all of this. A contributing factor is probably that I grew up in a small town in the southeast-- which I’ve always said put us at least 10 years behind in trends-- but I also feel like the world has changed more in the last 15 years than it did in the 50 years before that. I feel like there’s a huge generation gap between me and the kids just a few years younger who’ve only known the internet, but not much of one at all between me and the baby boomers-- some of whom are decades older.
Born in the summer of '69.
We had to write our university papers by hand. Which meant you had to carefully plan them first before you started writing (no copying and pasting back then). When computers and printers finally became widely used it was a great joy.
Grumpy Old Man’s Voice On
You kids today have it too easy! What with all your fancy, smancy smart phones and them computer games and such! Why, back in my day, we didn’t have none of that. None! No sir!
Why, when I was growin up, all I had for entertainment, if I was lucky and saved all my money, was a stick.Wow! I Loved it! Course, the only thing you could do with a stick was, poke your eye out because we were stupid too! AND WE LIKED IT! WE LOVED IT!
Grumpy Old Man’s Voice Off
I was ecstatic that when I could cut and paste in a word processor and then print it. My use of a typewriter was hell as I always screwed it up. A one page report could take me days to type and only get a few white out corrections on it. Even a hand written page was a pain. It took a decade for the giant protruding pencil callus on my finger to disappear. My pinky finger that was always tucked under my fist when writing is bent slightly from writing in school.
Many more men died from heart attacks earlier in their lives. Angioplasty has extended their lives decades. Dad lost many cousins in their early 40’s. Dad lasted 20 extra years because of angioplasty in the 80’s.
Oh gods yeah, it was a breakthrough. The only negative aspects I can see are that (1) my handwriting now sucks ass because I no longer seem to have the forearm/wrist muscles to control a pen properly and (2) I have become slightly sloppy in the way I go about organizing my thoughts when I need to write a long paper.
Other than that, it’s all good news. 
Video games.
When those of us in Gen X were kids, you couldn’t win video games. The games just kept getting progressively harder and harder until you failed. There generally wasn’t an ending- you were supposed to fail. The lesson we learned was that you could never win- all you could do was hope to hang on as long as possible. Oh, and that’ll be a quarter, please.
Kids nowadays have it easy- games are designed to end. Yes, you too can be a winner!