[HN Gopher] Oregon Trail Generation
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Oregon Trail Generation
Author : mmhsieh
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-07-24 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| letitbeirie wrote:
| I feel like this could have only happened to people in this very
| specific age range:
|
| In 1995, when I was a freshman in high school, they trotted my
| English class down to the library for a lesson on how to use "the
| information superhighway." For the next hour or so, the librarian
| dispensed wisdom to us about how to open Netscape, type URLs into
| the address bar, and that kind of thing.
|
| Put another way, they had a woman who did not know how to use the
| Internet try to teach a few dozen teenagers who _did_ know how to
| use the Internet how to do something they _did_ understand by
| reading them a book that she did not.
|
| I didn't learn anything about the Internet that day but I feel
| like I gained an appreciation for Kafka, even if I didn't know it
| at the time.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Well if it makes you feel any better we spent a whole week on
| the Dewey Decimal system and how to look up books via index
| cards. Because computerized indexes and search were rapidly
| replacing physical lookup, I never ever used that skill again.
| underseacables wrote:
| This defines my generation exactly. I was born in Early 80s, and
| I remember our family before the Apple computer, and after we got
| the Apple computer. I remember street maps, talking to people on
| the phone, the magic of three-way, and beepers. And as I grew up
| I watched it all change. I was an AOL kid. It was amazing being a
| kid when people began emailing one another.
| bredren wrote:
| Me too. I love this name because I grew up in Oregon.
|
| I also saw the move from rotary to cordless to caller ID. I
| heard "Shh. I'm talking long-distance" and also played
| Commander Keen and used Trumpet Winsock to connect at the
| ultra-fast 14.4k to local BBS's and eventually Teleport, our
| local ISP.
|
| We also grew up on Nintendo, I'd say that The Wizard starring
| Fred Savage is possibly an anthemic film since it showed off
| the most sophisticated game available (SM3) [2]
|
| As a minor point of this group a major non-digital event event
| of this time was the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens [1],
| which was the most disastrous volcanic eruption in US history.
| (Offers some perspective on the wildfire smoke, perhaps.)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Hel...
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._3#Developmen...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I imagine "the encyclopedia - beep-beep-beep-squawk - Snake -
| iPhone - Facebook" generation doesn't roll off the tongue quite
| as nicely.
| mattlondon wrote:
| The article seems to focus on "remembering a time before
| ...<foo>" and a general reverence of non-digital lifestyle etc
| like that is the important bit.
|
| I guess I am a xenial, and I remember this cross-over period as
| one of epic excitement and wonder as this "internet thing" took
| off and became something amazing. I was lucky enough to be online
| when a 14.4 modem was _fast_ and seeing the internet grow and
| develop since then at the same time as _I grew and developed_
| into an adult was quite the thing to experience. Fuck "knowing
| the analog days" - being there as the internet took off and
| changed was brilliant for me. Eager anticipation of genuinely big
| technical leaps that duly arrived and changed our lives
| significantly - broadband, MP3 players, smart phones, WiFi,
| pervasive 3g etc
|
| This was world-changing stuff happening _in our hands_.
|
| Kids today get what? To experience that time when
| Instagram/TikTok/<next app> went viral? How underwhelming.
| bredren wrote:
| I experienced this but I wouldn't discount TikTok going viral.
| I saw the early side of that product starting before the Boss
| Walk, and it really was sensational. The product is carving out
| a new form of expression and has evolved.
|
| I also wouldn't cede the biggest communication change in the
| past X years to our adolescence either. I think that immersive
| VR experiences in the metaverse will be a bigger change than no
| internet -> smartphones.
| emerged wrote:
| I grew up during the transition into the internet era and don't
| recall feeling cynical about digital or analog. I was intensely
| drawn into the internet, software, programming, but never
| thought "boy I'm glad stupid analog is going to be replaced"
|
| But now we've got cynicism everywhere about both analog and
| digital. Old analog technology is stupid and obsolete but new
| tech is clearly ripping our society to shreds in a variety of
| ways.
|
| So I guess I miss being happy with what we had AND being
| excited about the future.
| jart wrote:
| It's the greatest generation. I wish Wikipedia would call it
| Oregon Trail Generation rather than Xennial, since the latter
| sounds hideous like a Xenomorph or something.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| >It's the greatest generation
|
| Sorry, that's already taken:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, "Oregon Trail Generation" doesn't sound like anything to
| people from outside US of A :).
| chrisan wrote:
| That would be much better. Otherwise, I'd rather stick with Gen
| X than Xennial as Millennial has so many negative connotations
| these days.
| codesections wrote:
| I was born slightly outside (after) the official years for this
| generation, but the description for this generation seems to fit
| my childhood memories much more closely than many "Millennial"
| descriptions.
|
| Does anyone else born in the mid/late 80s share that feeling?
| jsonne wrote:
| Yeah I was born in 89 and growing up middle class in a more
| rural American small town we didn't get internet until the late
| 90s and didn't use it with any regularity until the early 00s.
| I got my first laptop when I was going to college in 2008.
| jonwest wrote:
| 100%. Mid-80's here and even as Millennial was coming into
| common use it never seemed to fit quite right with me, but
| neither did Gen-X. I have older siblings, and I think that
| helps as well since I was exposed to the same kinds of things
| that they were which blurs those lines further.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's definitely a time shift for different geographies. I
| consider myself fitting the overall concept, despite being born
| in late 1980s - I think it's because late 1980s here in Poland
| were like early 1980s in the US.
| salex89 wrote:
| Sure, technology didn't come to all parts of the world at the
| same time and/or was not affordable. I was born late 80s in
| Europe and can relate.
| teekert wrote:
| This feels very familiar. Got my first cell phone at 17 (Ericsson
| gf768), called girls at home (I can count them on 1 hand but is
| was always a "thing") and had to ask their father to put them on
| the line. I remember computers without internet (at first with
| orange or green screens) and cell phones without sms. And our
| first time online emailing friends with the family mail address.
| I typed most reports on computers but also had to visit the
| university for papers (although only once for a course). We took
| the ball from the teachers mouse in 96. The education systems
| always felt way behind with respect to computers. At home we had
| windows 95 while we were taught word processing on dos with a
| blue and black Word Perfect (5?).
|
| I had this discussion with colleagues we never felt like
| millennials (I'm from 1982). I like this piece. A Xenial is what
| I am.
| alabamacadabra wrote:
| What's more baffling is using the concept of "generations", being
| the idea that everyone born within a certain set of years has a
| certain experience. Is this not making it obvious that concept
| itself is without any merit?
| [deleted]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I visited Chimney Rock on a trip to Yellowstone last year. Felt
| nostalgic, like I had been there before. Was more worried about
| dysentery than Covid. I lost a lot of good people to dysentery.
| empressplay wrote:
| 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.
| jsonne wrote:
| Fwiw I grew up in a fairly small town in Illinois a few hours
| outside Chicago and though I was born in 89 I grew up without
| computers until I was like maybe 6 or 7? So not quite all my
| childhood but we didn't get internet until maybe the late 90s so
| to some degree this does resonate with me. I think with
| technological jumps like this your mileage may very a lot
| depending on if you're rich (we were solidly middle class) and
| where you lived in the US (urban versus rural) rather than it
| being a monolithic experience with a strict timeline.
| empressplay wrote:
| Agreed. Conversely I had my own computer when I was 6 in 1981
| and my first experiences on what would become the Internet
| happened in the late 1980s. It all depended on your parents and
| where you grew up.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Researchers out of Eindhoven University of Technology found
| that not every person that belongs to a major generation will
| share all the same characteristics that are representative for
| that generation.
|
| What?! An effectively continuous variation in values and
| experiences can't be clustered into homogeneous 15-year cohorts
| with an arbitrary phase? /s
| sidlls wrote:
| I don't think there are "15-year cohorts" so much as "era-
| defining bookends". I don't think anyone doing research (such
| as it can be called in a soft-science) seriously thinks there
| are clear, unfuzzy lines of demarcation.
| rvense wrote:
| Lenin supposedly said "There are decades where nothing
| happens, and weeks where decades happen."
|
| I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a
| non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and
| the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a
| generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one
| difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of
| the 90's as a time of apparent progress and optimism, and
| just how big a change the September 11 attacks were. She
| remembers them of course, but not as a point of abrupt
| change. She did not become politically aware until some time
| after, when the war of terror was in full swing.
|
| There's a bit in Coupland's Generation X where one of the
| main characters talks about remembering the Vietnam war being
| constantly in the news until one day it just disappeared, but
| his little not remembering it at all, to him it was just
| history. It feels kind of like that, in the inverse, in a
| way.
| sklargh wrote:
| My spouse and I have both reflected on our 90s childhoods
| as periods of functional non-history.
| philistine wrote:
| Serious people, after the fall of Communism, expected
| this to be the end of history. Turns out it was just a
| boring epilogue.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Is a period of relative peace (except for the first Gulf
| War, the Yugoslavian conflict, etc.) and prosperity non-
| history? Is a time more historical the worse it feels,
| just like an event is more worthy of news coverage the
| more death or suffering it causes? What a terrible thing
| history must be if it is only the story of pain.
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(page generated 2021-07-24 23:01 UTC)