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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I took a programming class at my high school in 1994. I was a sophomore and had been programming for a decade, including several internships. It was the first time the school had ever offered a computer class and on the first day the teacher started copying down code onto the whiteboard and as she did I and several other punks in the class started pointing out errors in her logic and syntax. At the end of the first day the school administration decided to make it a "study on your own" class. I learned a lot, mostly by heading out to the local bookstore and going through a few tomes.
Congrats? My freshman year was 1997 - and I know when I was in middle school in 1995 majority of my peers knew nothing about computers, didn't have a computer, let alone the Internet. I was a fortunate one to receive a 2nd hand computer and at that time I using Lynx (text based browser) to browse the web because I was using my local library's system as my ISP and connecting via Telix.
Rather than look down on your librarian for introducing a novel concept to students, I think she should be applauded for trying.
It's not obvious that there's a need to have a “generation” for everything. People then start countless discussions about the name as if the name is what really matters.
In my opinion, the characteristic aspect was the widely accepted (and promoted) idea that everyone should learn how to use a computer as a programmable device in the broad sense (whether it was kids with LOGO, professionals with professional software, or general public with general tools and UIs). That education was an important project on a state level. Then the goalposts were silently moved, and it was declared that user already knew enough, and the “intuitive design” or some other thing would deal with the rest. (That doesn't ring true: for some reason, people still need to spend 10 years at school instead of “intuitively” learning all those other things. Moreover, it was the crowd of already prepared people that allowed these practices to be viable.)
A couple of iterations, an today, in the “bright future”, there are crowds of computer illiterate people using computing devices as if they are another kind of TVs or phones. Which is, of course, good for the ones who sell those TV-like devices or software services, but is not good for the rest of the people. Despite all of the promotion, someone who, say, places “just” an internet-connected camera into a home or an office to “simply” check the video stream in a “convenient” smartphone application does not make it “more secure”. On the contrary, all kinds of trouble are to be expected, because a little bit of theory tells us that this system is only secured by someone's promises, and a little bit of practical data tells us that the hardware, software, and security practices in such a system are going to be awful most of the time.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like Millennial doesn't really mean anything. When 9/11 happened, "Millennials" included some early 20s, teenagers, children, and some kids who were too little to grasp the situation. The way the world changed compared to what had been normal is dramatically different for each of these.
I always loved this name for my generation. I came across this term and this wiki article years ago and it's very fitting for people my age. Maybe those born from 78-84? I was born in 82 and I know for sure I'm the Oregon Trail generation because I played The Oregon Trail in grade school. And, I remember the Challenger blowing up when I was in kindergarten.
And the big differentiator for me is simply the lack of commonality that we have with the generations after us. Xennials really had the same basic childhood that someone had going all the way back to the 1920s. Anyone that grew up with electricity and at least the Model T that is.
The easiest way to differentiate between newer generations and all that came before if they ever remember a time before the internet at all. Because that and smartphones were the two big game changers for society that I witnessed.
The internet changed the economy enormously, and the smartphone revealed how stupid and manipulated people could really be.
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?
Yeah I was born in 1987, which is theoretically well into "Millennial" territory by the numbers, and honestly a lot of the "characteristics" section of that article doesn't strike me as particularly well researched.
"AOL Adolescence" Yeah, AOL IM dominated late elementary/middle school.
"Developed relationships before social media". Myspace was the big thing in high school, with facebook taking over senior year because you needed a .edu address to get an account. Before that social mediate didn't really exist in its modern incarnation, every friendship prior to that was pre-social media, and the original social media relationships were largely predicated on real world relationships. Was rather nice back when that was the case.
"They usually weren't on Tinder or Grindr" Uh, Tinder's only been around since 2012, and took a while to gain prominence. Most millennials are outside of the window for Tinder to be their first dating experience. Most of my cohort had graduated college in 2010/2011, I know some people who got freaking married before Tinder even existed.
I could go on, but it seems like just another incarnation of "millennial means young and tech-addicted, so we're moving the goal posts so it means what we want it to mean and we'll make up a new word for what's leftover"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the date range here is wrong and should probably extend into the late eighties, as children of that age also had analog childhoods. Oregon Trail was a staple of school computers into the late nineties.
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.
I think we were a very fortunate generation. Got exposure to GenX culture at a young age (which was transformative in the early 90’s) but also were just old enough by the mid 90’s to enjoy that bubble and then get into the job world right as Web 2.0 began.
Were young enough to not be too affected by the financial crisis like GenX and old enough to ride the wave afterwards, which many millennials were still a bit too young for.
Last generation to have affordable college.
I think being such a small generation opened a lot of opportunities and options to be more ahead than GenX and Millenial.
I'm very much a xennial, but in fact, did not ask out my first date over the phone. We used a BBS like all the kids are still doing. Right? Dammit, I'm old
teekert|4 years ago
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.
underseacables|4 years ago
bredren|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
mattlondon|4 years ago
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.
emerged|4 years ago
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.
bredren|4 years ago
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.
letitbeirie|4 years ago
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|4 years ago
dweekly|4 years ago
fma|4 years ago
Rather than look down on your librarian for introducing a novel concept to students, I think she should be applauded for trying.
Everyone started somewhere.
tantalor|4 years ago
ogurechny|4 years ago
In my opinion, the characteristic aspect was the widely accepted (and promoted) idea that everyone should learn how to use a computer as a programmable device in the broad sense (whether it was kids with LOGO, professionals with professional software, or general public with general tools and UIs). That education was an important project on a state level. Then the goalposts were silently moved, and it was declared that user already knew enough, and the “intuitive design” or some other thing would deal with the rest. (That doesn't ring true: for some reason, people still need to spend 10 years at school instead of “intuitively” learning all those other things. Moreover, it was the crowd of already prepared people that allowed these practices to be viable.)
A couple of iterations, an today, in the “bright future”, there are crowds of computer illiterate people using computing devices as if they are another kind of TVs or phones. Which is, of course, good for the ones who sell those TV-like devices or software services, but is not good for the rest of the people. Despite all of the promotion, someone who, say, places “just” an internet-connected camera into a home or an office to “simply” check the video stream in a “convenient” smartphone application does not make it “more secure”. On the contrary, all kinds of trouble are to be expected, because a little bit of theory tells us that this system is only secured by someone's promises, and a little bit of practical data tells us that the hardware, software, and security practices in such a system are going to be awful most of the time.
dehrmann|4 years ago
What?! An effectively continuous variation in values and experiences can't be clustered into homogeneous 15-year cohorts with an arbitrary phase? /s
sidlls|4 years ago
empressplay|4 years ago
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.
nickthemagicman|4 years ago
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.
acidburnNSA|4 years ago
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.
chrisco255|4 years ago
Igelau|4 years ago
BuckRogers|4 years ago
And the big differentiator for me is simply the lack of commonality that we have with the generations after us. Xennials really had the same basic childhood that someone had going all the way back to the 1920s. Anyone that grew up with electricity and at least the Model T that is.
The easiest way to differentiate between newer generations and all that came before if they ever remember a time before the internet at all. Because that and smartphones were the two big game changers for society that I witnessed.
The internet changed the economy enormously, and the smartphone revealed how stupid and manipulated people could really be.
codesections|4 years ago
Does anyone else born in the mid/late 80s share that feeling?
scottLobster|4 years ago
"AOL Adolescence" Yeah, AOL IM dominated late elementary/middle school.
"Developed relationships before social media". Myspace was the big thing in high school, with facebook taking over senior year because you needed a .edu address to get an account. Before that social mediate didn't really exist in its modern incarnation, every friendship prior to that was pre-social media, and the original social media relationships were largely predicated on real world relationships. Was rather nice back when that was the case.
"They usually weren't on Tinder or Grindr" Uh, Tinder's only been around since 2012, and took a while to gain prominence. Most millennials are outside of the window for Tinder to be their first dating experience. Most of my cohort had graduated college in 2010/2011, I know some people who got freaking married before Tinder even existed.
I could go on, but it seems like just another incarnation of "millennial means young and tech-addicted, so we're moving the goal posts so it means what we want it to mean and we'll make up a new word for what's leftover"
jonwest|4 years ago
TeMPOraL|4 years ago
jsonne|4 years ago
salex89|4 years ago
jsonne|4 years ago
empressplay|4 years ago
ipaddr|4 years ago
I can't imagine the game with a mouse.
https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Unisys_Icon_Syst...
throwawaysea|4 years ago
jart|4 years ago
layoutIfNeeded|4 years ago
Sorry, that’s already taken: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
nemo44x|4 years ago
Were young enough to not be too affected by the financial crisis like GenX and old enough to ride the wave afterwards, which many millennials were still a bit too young for.
Last generation to have affordable college.
I think being such a small generation opened a lot of opportunities and options to be more ahead than GenX and Millenial.
TeMPOraL|4 years ago
chrisan|4 years ago
klyrs|4 years ago
seattle_spring|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
alabamacadabra|4 years ago
[deleted]