[empressplay]

I was slightly early to the party but I still class myself as a Xennial because I had a Timex Sinclair when I was 6 (1981) and various other computers ever since, and I spent as much time as I could on BBSes and chat systems from about 1987 (age 12) onwards (yay 300 baud!)

At elementary school I was one of a handful of kids that used the (two) computers (Apple II and Commodore 64) to play Oregon Trail (not the fancy one, there have been versions of Oregon Trail since the 1970s) and MULE, and in junior high I was an administrator of our newly installed mac lab.

The only reason I had a social life at all outside of school and modemming was because my parents wouldn't let me use the modem before 7pm on weekends. Then I got my own phone line and my social life was pretty much exclusively with other modemmers! When I wasn't on the line, I ran my own BBS. I had a university account and an e-mail address in my early teens.

I held out a bit on the cellphone because I would have had to pay for it (but I had various handheld PCs with modems that I used with payphones and landlines wherever I could jack into them). So yeah, computers have been a part of most aspects of my daily life since I was a young child, which was lucky because I can't imagine life as an introverted, autistic child without them.