topflightpro

One young woman at my conference this week said she thought I was about 28.

gsteinb

aren't you?

Ygduf

bleh. I saw a thing once where they put in a generation born from like 75-85, who were old enough to remember life before internet/cell phones/other tech, but also "grew up" alongside those technologies.

I prefer that.

Enthalpic

^ that's me (1978). My first computer had 64Kb of RAM (Commodore) now my phone has 4GB...

Flatballer

I was born in '88, which puts me in the millenial range basically anyway you slice it I think.

I remember before the internet and cell phones, but not by a ton. We had AOL and stuff when I was probably 6 or 7, so that's pretty young. I also don't tend to feel like a millenial, despite being smack dab in the middle of basically any definition. Not sure why.

himespau 

As someone born in '79 but who lived out in the boonies (too far for cable, too many trees for satellite), I really don't fit it with a lot of the GenX as I missed out on a lot of their cultural references that whole angst and ennui thing that made up the early 90's but definitely am not a millenial, so that works for me too. Our family computer was that commodore 64 right until I went to college in 1997 (I got a computer for the folks and taught them how to use it with a dial up connection through the school my mom taught at so they could use this new "e-mail" thing to communicate with me). I still remember coming home for Christmas my sophomore year (I think) of college and having to stop my dad from using his pocket knife to cut the mouse cord because the ball in the mouse (remember those) had gotten all gummed up and kept jumping all around rather than tracking smoothly. Had to teach him how to pull it and clean it off.

The wife and I have been watching "Everything Sucks" on Netflix (just started last night) and it seems so true to our youth.

topflightpro

I didn't get email or internet until I got to college - also in 97. My family didn't get email or internet until a year later, when my brother, who is a year young, went to college and did not have high speed internet in his dorm. They got an AOL account so he could access the Internet.

I did get my first cell phone in 98 or 99. At the time, prices were coming down, and it was cheaper to call home on the cell at 10c per min. as opposed to the 15c per minute on the college long distance phone plan. Plus, I was going to college out of state and moving each year and spending my summers working in NYC, so it was helpful to have one phone number regardless of what state or address I was at.

furiousferret

I was born in 72. I think this generation has probably had more technological change than any other time frame in history. I've seen video games, cable tv, cell phones, personal computing, and the internet come about and I've probably missed a ton of other things. Pretty cool time to be alive.

hack

Born in 80. We didn’t get a computer until 96??. Most of my reports were on a typewriter or a word processor/digital typewriter. Didn’t have internet until college in 98. Went from no internet straight to high speed in the dorms, glad to have missed out on dial up.

Got a cell phone in 99. Probably the same Nokia as 99.9% of everyone else at that time ... had that snake game.

Sadly, my computer tech skills stagnated around 2000. Just not something that grabbed my attention and I’d rather have been outside.

TheKillerPenguin

Think of how weird it must've been for a centenarian born in say, 1870, to live through the moon landing.

Kids these days and their penicillin, back in my day we walked uphill both ways to the bloodletter, and we liked it...

hubcyclist

I think I enjoyed the computer too much in the early 2000's, went from playing soccer in HS (not well but I was athletic and active with different sports) to being in the neighborhood of 220lbs through a lot of my 20's lol

I still remember getting my first PC in 95, just as windows 95 came out, in fact I had to send out for the upgrade CD. That computer cost 2k and was a pentium 100mhz with 1gb HD and 4MB of ram and the high speed campus network was wonderful, it was like the wild-west of file sharing, so much music and movies (I imagine campus networks have cracked down on that stuff)

caloso

During my final semester of undergrad I took a class in Pascal programming just for kicks and the units. Towards the end of the class the professor announced that he was teaching a class in the fall that might be interesting to us and he'd pre-admit anybody who signed up early. I was ready to graduate so I didn't think much about it. This was at Berkeley in 1989 and the class was on hypercards, which I guess was a precursor to html, and I imagine everyone who took the class now owns his own private island and 200ft yacht.

rubiksoval

All the coolest kids in my high school had beepers.

I...did not.

Flatballer

This winter is never going to end.

Another (even bigger, up to 16 inches of wet snow possible here) storm Wednesday, and then another Monday. I'm ready for spring.

carpediemracing 

My first "my own" computer was a Pentium 90, 4BM, 540MB, Micron, about $2800 (it even had the math flaw, where it couldn't do math right). Back then there was so much emphasis put on tiny gains, the benchmark tests were crazy. But spending such serious coin on a computer, you felt like you should be getting your money's worth. To put some things in perspective, my 88k mile 87? 88? GTI was $4000, and my total cost on a pretty nifty race bike (17 lbs, tubulars, Campy) was about $1000.

*edit I forgot this part - when I got it the computer ran.... I can't remember what the old Windows was, but it was ancient, I think it didn't even have Windows Explorer. But Windows 95 came out and I upgraded the machine myself, basically doing it because I didn't know any better (kind of like going 55 mph on a descent on a bike with no helmet, which would absolutely petrify me now). When I closed the shop I interviewed at an IT place (I figured computers would be a good field). One of their IT guys interviewed me, asked me about my own computer. I told him I bought it in 1994. He asked me what OS I had on it. I told him Windows 95. He asked if anyone else worked on the machine. No, I told him. "Ah, so you must have upgraded the machine to Windows 95 on your own." I thought about it and realized he was right. They hired me.

The first family computer was a TRS-80 III ($3000?, way before my Pentium P90), which I've managed to keep. It currently has the upgraded 5-1/4" floppy drive, but when we first got it the "main drive" was literally a cassette tape. The hard drive was a cassette tape! Radioshack sold tapes especially for computers, but because they were cassette tapes they had capacity listed in minutes. The green tape we had was I think 15 minutes, there was a 30 minute tape (red?) but it was quicker to find load stuff off the shorter green tape so that was our go-to tape. I put mixed songs on there once we upgraded to the floppy. Printers were crazy expensive, with the large format dot matrix printers easily hitting about $4000.

During the Bethel Spring Series one of my employee/worker/helpers was a UCONN student. I drove him back a couple times since I lived closer to UCONN than Bethel. I told him I was really glad that CounterStrike didn't exist when I went to school, else I'd have failed out. He seemed puzzled, asking me what games we played. I told him there was no network, to log in I had to go to the Math-Science building and log into a mainframe terminal. We had no internet. He was absolutely shocked. I don't think he realized just how old I was, although I met his parents about 4 months before he was born, and I was one of the bike racer friends that visited every so often until he was maybe 12 or so.

Ttoc6

I was born in 95. I have foundational memories of using a computer. According to my parents I found a bug in a sesame street kids game when I was like 3 years old. The thought of trying to get any sort of work done without the itnernet just puzzles me. I don't know how anyone in any profession got on before google and stackoverflow.

I ahve some coworkers that buy into the the generational politics stuff too much. Lumping all of "my people" (millenials) together, but makes sure to point out i'm one of the good ones. Even if our political ideas disagree by every definition of the word. Maybe I should just start lumping him in with all the other baby boomers that ruined our economy and environment . (/s)

himespau 

One of my roommates (I think sophomore year) failed out because of all night counterstrike (or maybe half-life?) binges.

topflightpro

My freshman year roommate was undone by Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The wake up at 5 pm, play until 5 am, then try to stumble through class didn't work.

He also was on the 'Tussin, so that didn't help either.

himespau 

I'm not sure mine ever went to class. I still have memories of the reflections of the games bouncing off the walls as I tried to sleep. He did have a subscription to playboy that kept on coming after he got kicked out and he told me not to forward to his house because he didn't need to get into more trouble, so I guess that was nice??? Eh, the fact that I had the room to myself second semester made the sleepless first semester worth it. Much better than the first roommate who ran away from school the week before finals because he couldn't face his family to tell them he was failing.

big john

The first on-board computers widely used in GM cars were in 1978. No scan tool, no reading of data. Later, the first scan tools came out and the baud rate was so slow you could disconnect a sensor and reconnect it quickly and that event wouldn't show up on the data, or would show up after a couple seconds.

GM came out with this huge machine you could use to get a basic data list which would appear on a 4 inch tv screen. It came with a set of jumper harnesses and the machine would prompt you to install a jumper harness so the machine could display the actual voltage. I guess they didn't think we could use a voltmeter.
Even into the 90s I was working on some cars without any way to read data, Jeeps, Renaults, some Eagles had no scan tool at the dealer.
We got a better GM scan tool in 1996 and got a lot more function and we started using a laptop in 2010. I still have to guess most of the intermittent crap I deal with.

I was born in 1954 so I remember the moon landing, JFK getting shot, black and white tv with no remote, Jimi Hendrix on the Tonight show and sweating bullets over getting drafted to Viet Nam, (I didn't get drafted, had a high lottery number).

himespau 

Isn't it the McLaren supercar that they need a computer from the early 90's to diagnose/tune/repair because it's the only one with the right operating system/connections? If memory serves, the one shop that could do repairs was frequently scanning eBay to scavenge old parts to keep the computers running.

big john

I don't know anything about that, have enough trouble trying to keep up with electric cars, diesels, and Corvettes. I'm not really a car guy, an enthusiast type. People are often surprised when I don't know something about the industry. One of our vendors couldn't believe I didn't know what a Dodge Hellcat was, (I do now, sort of).

topflightpro

Yes. It's the McLaren F1, which will cost you many millions of dollars to buy.

himespau 

I don't know much about cars either. Just amused by the story of some super high end carmaker trolling eBay for bulky and slow laptops from the early 90's to do engine diagnostics on their $10 million cars when I just dropped $8 on a bluetooth code reader for my car shortly before Christmas (haven't bothered to get around to figuring out how to plug it in or use it yet though).

big john

Nothing would surprise me. I did see Jay Leno's Garage where he had a $2.9M Bugatti on and he said the required yearly service cost $25K and was performed by a tech flown in from France.

It can go through a full tank of fuel in 12 minutes at top speed, (261mph).