[META] What are the demographics of this community?
[META] What are the demographics of this community?
Am I the only Zoomer? I see a lot of "I remember"-type responses, so I have to wonder.
I’m in that weird group that’s between Gen-X and Millennial. I’ve seen us called Xennials or the Oregon Trail Generation.
There are dozens of us!
But seriously, I think we had one of the most interesting technological evolution of any generation. Going from using the Dewey decimal system and encyclopedias early on, to using the internet before graduating.
Was Oregon Trail really that huge?
It really was. It was a time when most didn’t have computers at home. Once a week you’d get to go down to the computer lab and play educational games from MECC. Oregon Trail being the most popular of the bunch.
About twice a week we would go to the computer lab filled with Apple IIes. Usually we had to play Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or some other game to reenforce whatever we learned in class. After we finished the game in the lesson plan, we could then play whatever educational game we wanted. Oregon Trail was a popular choice because nothing was funnier than having the game say a classmate had died or broke a leg. And the hunting and rafting mini games were the closest to arcade games.
Also keep in mind that the only exposure most of the teachers had to a computer were the mainframe terminals in the school's office or the computer lab. MECC put together a lot of software and training for teachers. A school building out an Apple II based computer lab with a bunch of MECC software was as close to turnkey as they could get at the time. The documentation for Oregon Trail or Odell Lake gives you an idea of what it was like.
http://www.mecc.co/history/the-oregon-trail---a-157/mecc_a-157_oregon_trail.pdf
http://www.mecc.co/science/odell-lake---a-192/mecc_a-192_odell_lake.pdf
Xennial!
First computer I used in school was an Apple IIe with a 720kb, 5.25" floppy drive.
First computer at home was a Tandy 1000. Still out in the garage, I think.
Xennial as well. My first home PC was an Epson with 640k and a 3.5 DD disk drive and a "Turbo" button on the front of the case.
I remember getting a kick out of a game that used RealSound, a piece of software for doing voice and other similarly complex sound out of the standard PC speaker (apparently it handled 6-bit PCM audio, though I wouldn't know that at the time).
That game included a card explaining how to improve the audio out of your PC by building a cable to connect the line going to your PC speaker to an RCA cable to connect it to a stereo or boombox. The cable wasn't great at what it did (and better designs had been devised since), but it was pretty simple (if I remember right just some RCA cable, a couple of alligator clips and a capacitor).
Floppy drives have been a recent fascination of mine. A small, semi-disposable soft-robotic hard drive, how ingenious.
Gen-X, here.
Nice. We still need a Boomer. Silent Gen would be a nice bonus.
What format did you use for removable storage at first?
5.25" floppy disks, formatted on a Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive.
Another GenX. Aka the best generation.
I'm a Millennial (35 years old)
When did you get the internet for the first time?
My first PC was in 1998, I think we had internet in 1999.
There are dozens of us, dozens!
Im somewhere between Gen Z and Millennial i don't feel like either "Culture" is normal
I'm a millennial but I also have an interest in computing before my time. The possibility of understanding the computer entices me, whereas modern computing is more interested in understanding me.
Xennial here! Had friends with Atari 2600s, first childhood console was an NES, and first home computer was a used Atari 800XL.
Oh, and my first school computers in small-town Ontario were Commodore PETs and ICONs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)).
Wow, go Ontario Ministry of Education.
RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.
Worry not I am also a fellow Zoomer.
I always enjoyed retro technology either because I didn't use to get the latest stuff right away or because there's a certain charm to it that still grabs my interest.
I'm on the younger side (not sure what the category cutoffs are) and I have the same reason. It started with me getting stuff that I wanted to try as a kid, then it went from there
Oh yeah? Are you a big retro gamer then?
Old fartBoomer here, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.I’m a xennial. Though we were always a bit behind the curve (my first computer was a Philips XT clone, back in the early nineties), so I guess I’ve always been retrocomputing.
But yeah, it’s kind of shocking to see people being all nostalgic about stuff I consider newish.
(And I’m still cursing myself for throwing out my CPD-G420)
Old enough to have bought a new C64 from Toys R Us
I'm in my 20s. I got into retro computing because I used older (Windows 95) computers my parents handed down to me when I was a child and things got cemented and I started looking at even older tech when I started watching YouTube videos covering retro computing.
Alright! It's kind of similar for me, I grew up playing among old towers in our basement, and I still have a supply of retro stuff handed down to me, if I can catch it. I love seeing problems solved in different ways, or even the same way but visibly in old hardware. Today it's all buried under the higher layers of abstraction, and the the other end of gen Z hasn't even used a filesystem necessarily, let alone had to think about the physical layer.
Old. Just caught the tail end of the era of big machines.
Learnt Unix on a VAX 11/750. Used text terminals for a long time.
In the early 90's my college had a VAX for student accounts via wonderful dial up The CS dept had Sparcstation 2 workstations
Gen Z here. Oldest computer I remember my family having was an XP tower, a Dell Dimension.
I studied computer engineering, and that interest pulled me into retro tech. I love seeing what older hardware is capable of — I’ve got a Pentium laptop that can load old Reddit and stream music over wifi.
There’s a trove of old hardware and software to dig through too with so many unique odds and ends. History and tech worth preserving. One of my favorite projects so far was doing some programming challenges in BASIC on an Apple II. Anything old-tech is fun to me :)
There's a really noticeable difference in motivation between the old and young users here. For you and me, it's conceptual, for a lot of the older users it's pure nostalgia because I guess the concepts aren't new.
My first computer was a 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum, when I was maybe 12 years old. That's how old I am.
There's a couple proper boomers in here now, so step aside lol. I'm still hoping a silent generation person might turn up.
GenX - I wrote my very 1st program in Assembler on the Odyssey 2 game system, on channel 2, on my parents Magnavox TV (Rosewood entertainment center with the FM radio & record player) in the family room 1979.
That's a pretty impressive start!
I'm a millennial. First computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 with extended color basic. Then a C64 (which was sort of disappointing since extended color basic was way better than anything on the commodore, but the games were much better), and then I started with an 8088 with a herc monochrome monitor and no hard drive and only went up from there.
To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.
Atari VCS > VIC20 > C64> Amiga 500 > Amiga 1200 > Amiga 4000
Millennial. But we had Granny's Garden running on an Acorn Archidedes in our country rather than Oregon Trail. I was a kid in the 90s
I still have my first VIC-20. Representing!
I'm approaching the top of the hill.
What was your first machine?
A Packard Bell Legend 486. Can't recall the exact model.
I'm 29!
Millennial, I guess.
Permanently Deleted
Hey, another prairie person!
Another Oregan Trail generation here.
I'm curious about what's going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I've made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck's Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they're going to think about old tech when they're older. I haven't told them that it's "old" or "retro" yet, so they just think they're normal fun games.
Yeah my kids get to play 90's CD-ROM infotainment games. World of Richard Scarry and such. Basic math, phonics and spelling haven't changed since then and these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads! First it was on a PowerBook G3 that is going bad so it's been swapped out for an iMac G4.
these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads
That's a big plus. I also like that they have to use the keyboard, since the mouse can be a bit tricky when you're young.
I had no idea there was a Richard Scarry game! They love the books, so maybe I should give it a shot. (Though it does look pretty mouse-heavy)
I have two little ones that I’ve made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck’s Playground are their favourites)
And they appreciate it, huh. It makes sense, I guess that's the digital-age version of a kid playing with the box their toy came in. And man, some of those old games really are timeless. If I had some of my own, and they expressed interest, I'd like to try teaching them from both ends of the stack instead of starting in the middle like I did. It was a bit frustrating knowing how to code, but not how to either make a modern-looking application, or how the code was itself working.
Same here, 43 years old.
The alphas probably won't have a lot of computing on the cinder. 🤷🏻♀️
Unless we all get to it & fix climate 💁🏻♀️
Not a zoomer, but I am on the youngest edge of millennial -- the first computer I remember using was running Windows 95, and our first home computer was a Pentium era HP. My love for the older stuff didn't start until I was much older.
You're probably not far off from me then, '95 was my first too, but I think I usually am said to fall on the Zoomer side.
Millennial here. I used computers from a very young age, and when my near-continuous use became untenable, my parents got me my own: first computer was a Macintosh IIfx, then a Sun Ultra 1, then a Power Mac G4 (the stripes on the front, handles, don't remember exact model name). Everything after the G4 has been less exciting, even if it's all more powerful. Not sure if this is because I've gotten older or if the gear has gotten less fun.
Milennial. Got started with computers when my dad brought home a Mac Classic for Christmas 1990. Our elementary school still used Apple II machines for a while (number munchers, ad libs and so on) before switching to Macs. Didn't even see a PC until years and years later.
The first operating system I used was windows XP (:
Me zoomer as well, I suppose.
Learned some language (I don't know if it was Basic or other) on an Apple II at school in fifth grade. Asked for a family computer for xmas and was disappointed that we got a Mac IIsi because I couldn't program it. 80MB HD. Everymac.com says 2 or 5MB of RAM.
SCSI! Back when data cables were huge and included terminators and channels or whatever. Stop making things so damn convenient and let us work our asses off to plug things in. /s
Shit, I went through the same thing with learning Basic on an Apple II and never being able to acquire(rarely even encountered) one of the right models to use what I had learned after I left that school. Lusted after the IIc for a hot minute, let me tell ya.
'91 baby here that used a Toshiba T1000 back when I was in diapers.
The farthest back I can actually remember is a PowerMac G3 in school and a few Compaq machines at home running Windows 95.
I remember when my own little Zoomer was born, so I can't help ya here.
Lol. My parents put up a website to commemorate my birth. Apparently my dad put a lot of work into some gif and is bummed they lost track of the data.
Started with a Tandy 1000.
I always coveted the Tandy 1000, but I never got one. Which one did you have?
That was pretty early on for me so only remember a few details. Playing Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Sim was the main thing I did on it.
Millennial here. Started on a garbage picked pentium 2 that I ran DOS on.
A computer is would be a good find in those days. Did you have to do much to get it running?
PSU and RAM had to be replaced. Garbage picked those too.
Xennial. Grew up memorizing phone numbers, using 1-800-COLLECT to get picked up from the mall, and typing basic programs from magazines into qbasic.
Starting my fourth decade on this rock. Distressingly pale... My boys are into trying to fix and upgrade the consoles & PC's they've grown up with, plus a couple old PowerPC G4 & G5 Macs I snatched up a few years ago, so we'll see where that goes.
I remember xp... Thanks about it
@CanadaPlus I'm 54. If you're into the generation markers, I'm a Gen X. We don't get your generation's jokes and we're totally comfortable with that.
Wife bad? I'm sorry, are we being catty? Haha.
@CanadaPlus See...
Another gen-z dude here 🙋🏼♂️
Nice! Did you experience the CD era at all, or were you straight into MP3s?
More like both, i always had a little cd collection, but it was mostly self-burned from mp3s my dad bought off iTunes. I also had a early-ish mp3 player at some point.
I was born in 1991. I do not know what that makes me... half dead maybe.😹
Millennial, I'm pretty sure.