from Hacker News

Oregon Trail Generation

by mmhsieh on 7/24/21, 6:12 PM with 48 comments

• by teekert on 7/24/21, 9:28 PM

  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.

• by underseacables on 7/24/21, 7:28 PM

  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.

• by mattlondon on 7/24/21, 8:06 PM

  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.

• by letitbeirie on 7/24/21, 9:07 PM

  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.

• by ogurechny on 7/24/21, 11:42 PM

  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.

• by dehrmann on 7/24/21, 7:17 PM

  > 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

• by empressplay on 7/24/21, 10:27 PM

  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.

• by nickthemagicman on 7/24/21, 11:05 PM

  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.

• by chrisco255 on 7/24/21, 9:34 PM

  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.

• by Igelau on 7/24/21, 11:23 PM

  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.

• by BuckRogers on 7/25/21, 12:04 AM

  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.

• by codesections on 7/24/21, 8:51 PM

  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?

• by jsonne on 7/24/21, 10:29 PM

  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.

• by ipaddr on 7/25/21, 1:03 AM

  I remember playing this on an icon computer with a trackball attached.

  I can't imagine the game with a mouse.

  https://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Unisys_Icon_Syst...

• by throwawaysea on 7/25/21, 12:32 AM

  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.

• by jart on 7/24/21, 8:08 PM

  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.

• by klyrs on 7/25/21, 2:41 AM

  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

• by seattle_spring on 7/25/21, 1:34 AM

  I'm solidly millennial by definition, but I feel much closer to the "Oregon Trail" generation.