| THIS IS ME. I've never identified with X-gen or Millenials but THIS. YES! I had a landline as a child but then around 12.....things started to get digital. I remember hunting bears and rabbits in my 'computer processing' class in high school in Oregon trail. Which was a class that attempted to teach kids about the new technology that was coming out but wasn't great, because the teacher was a lady in her 60's and me and my friends were light years ahead of her. The internet was all text for a while, then HTML came out and things started to get CRAZY!' One friend made the newspaper because he was in high school making tons of money WRITING WEBSITES for people. I had a beep beep boop modem and you had to pay for the internet by the MINUTE. My buddys dad had a CAR PHONE because they were super rich. I went from landline, to flip phone, to blackberry, to smart phone. Text and talk were limited to X number or X number of minutes. My first computer was a 386 and I would hack the autoexec.bat files to get games to work. It's pretty crazy being EXACTLY on the cusp of such a massive revolution and cultural shift. |
Getting that first dot matrix printer was pretty magical. Especially since we could design our own dinosaurs by mixing heads, bodies, legs, and tails of a wide variety of dinosaurs, name them something ridiculous, and print them out. So many dinosaur printouts.
[1] https://archive.org/details/msdos_Designasaurus_1988
We had to upgrade the 386 to a 486 and install a math coprocessor to play DOOM.
Then later, it was all about SkiFree and Jezzball.
My favorite book was Windows 95 Secrets.
My small town school had a pretty solid computer class where we learned typing, then hypercard, and then digital video editing. The teacher convinced me somehow to make a movie about wheeling around a computer cart around the grounds to a soundtrack full of 'The Drifters' type music
Way later in life I found the guy who ran the one big server that brought internet to most of the community. He said the continuous bandwidth upgrade needs were driven almost entirely by porn traffic.