On the topic of Oregon Trail: does anybody else recall having access to another MECC game at school, titled Freedom!? My school must have either not received or ignored the memo to destroy all copies at the time. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
Yeah - I still feel like there's a small cutout from about 1975 through 1985 who grew up without computers and actually remember not having them.
If you're born in 86 or so, you had computers in school from Kindergarten forward. You were using the internet in elementary school.
They had a name attached to that period for a bit but it's largely been abandoned.
My first memory of computers was when I was in elementary school and we would go to the computer lab. We had a bunch with the green monitors and one "color" one that had a purple screen. I only ever remember playing Oregon Trail on it. I was born in 1977, so I remember life with and without them. [Reply]
My dad was born in 1929 but I consider him as part of the Greatest Generation. I don't like the way generations are being used to divide the people into subsets with animus toward each other. And while I wasn't "like" my dad and my uncles in so many ways I always respected them and as I've gotten older I find myself wishing I had been more like them. Hat tip to them! [Reply]
Honestly, I think it's more reasonable to segregate by what president was in office when you were born. I was born in 1959, but I have little in common with people born in the late 40s/early 50s - completely different circumstances growing up.
My formative years were the late 60s/early 70s, so presumably, I'd be more influenced by the Summer of Love, the Vietnam War, etc., than the early Boomers.
BTW - I'm an Eisenhower baby.
This definitely sounds like a good subject for Rainman to investigate - a more equitable way to identify age groups. [Reply]
Originally Posted by philfree:
My dad was born in 1929 but I consider him as part of the Greatest Generation. I don't like the way generations are being used to divide the people into subsets with animus toward each other. And while I wasn't "like" my dad and my uncles in so many ways I always respected them and as I've gotten older I find myself wishing I had been more like them. Hat tip to them!
Agreed. it makes no sense once you realize that whatever problem you have with a particular generation, you can blame on the generation that raised them, and the generation that raised them, and so on. [Reply]
Originally Posted by TambaBerry:
I was born in 87, first computer lab i remember was in middle school that had internet access. I remember having one computer in our classroom that we played things like oregon trail and typing games on.
81 -- my first memory of computers is having a 286 with DOS that was essentially a glorified word processor at home. At school I'd say 2nd or 3rd grade (so 89/90) where we played Carmen San Diego. But that wasn't in my day to day classroom - that was in Bridges on Tuesdays; only about 8-10 of us in that class.
Day to day classroom use wasn't until middle school. My handwriting was bad enough that if I could type an assignment, I would - that was 4th or 5th grade with our little dot matrix printer at home (and tearing off the little strips on the side then making snakes out of them) and that was certainly out of the ordinary from my classmates. That would've been probably around 1992.
Though like you, we did have a couple 'computer lab' days per week with stuff like Oregon Trail or various reading/math games for an hour or two a couple times/wk.
But otherwise we were still using those transparencies and chalkboards for lessons. That seemed to have changed up quite a bit from 1990 through about 1994. My sister was born in '86 and remembers computer use being far more pervasive - at least in the Park Hill school district.
Fall of 1993 was middle school (I'm pretty sure) because we built our new place during the '93 floods and that's when I moved schools to start Middle School (do NOT do that to your kids; Middle Schoolers are evil enough when they know you; they're goddamn demons when they don't). So for me, daily computer use at school and ready internet access was a thing in the fall of '93. [Reply]
Originally Posted by ModSocks:
Yeah, the Oregon Trail generation. Same. We grew up on VHS and Goosbumps books and watched as we transitioned from the Sony Walkman to the Sony Discman.
We also went from the O.G Nintendo and this bad ass new technology, the Sega CD and the first Playstation.
Then it was giga-pets for the girls, and finally....the Nokia cell phone took over in our teen years....with those fucking Nokia phone case and screen protector kiosks around every corner at the mall. Stupid egg shaped phone....and everyone had one. We pretty much rolled right on through pagers.
Sega CD - the best example of a good idea that was poorly executed you'll ever see.
I traded a pair of Roller Blades to a neighbor kid for one of those and a couple of games. I got took (and the roller blades were shit; bearings were shot).
It was like they came up with the idea and then just never bothered making games that were actually worth playing on it. Got it dumped off on some other kid for Joe Montana Football and NHL '93 and considered it a massive win. [Reply]
