How many people here grew up without internet or computers?

[Drako]

We didn't even have a color TV when I grew up.

 

[KentState]

A curious byproduct is companies striving to adapt their products to these cyber culture "norms" rather than the other way around. Only time will tell if this is a better approach but, given my views of the average basement dweller, I'm betting against it.

I work with one such company that has taken the philosophy that they will solely market towards this group and the others will follow. Seems like the focus right now is purely on millennials as if they somehow have the greatest amount of spending power and everyone wants to be like them.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I work with one such company that has taken the philosophy that they will solely market towards this group and the others will follow. Seems like the focus right now is purely on millennials as if they somehow have the greatest amount of spending power and everyone wants to be like them.

There's a train wreck waiting to happen. On the surface, the problem is self correcting because those of us not born into the culture are dying off. However, that perspective is forgetting that the cyber culture is young, lacking in depth and, without ties to community, country or, class. Some would say this is a good thing but, from a business standpoint, cyber culture is an amorphous mass without direction.

 

[CZroe]

I was 14 when I sent my first email was from my XBAND video game modem in 1995 (I was in the beta test market), but that was a dial-up video game matchup service that would download a couple newsletters and exchange "X-mail" between dial-up matches which had nothing to do with the Internet, so I don't think it counts. I might have checked out Nintendo's website a couple times at the public library before that and definitely did a few times after until getting a PC in 1996 and signing up for AOL at the worst time possible... right when everyone else was due to "unlimited" hours and they were overwhelmed with all the demand. I was 16 by that time. I hated every second of AOL and bummed access to college PCs as much as possible for my online activity for the next few years, shuttling things home by 3.5" high-density double-sided sneakernet. I got a cable modem in 1998 and never looked back.

 

[BurnItDwn]

dad bought an Apple IIe when I was 5 years old. I didnt get on a BBS on my own until my dad got a 2400 baud modem and we had a 486 DX... very early 90s.

 

[HeXen]

We didn't even have a color TV when I grew up.

Us either. It was a 13" b&w with a single antenna. We could pick up Channel 2/49 public broadcasting really good but the other locals were quite fuzzy. Needless to say, I watched a lot of Bob Ross, Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rogers and Sesame St as a kid.

We got our first color tv, a 19" hitachi when I was in the 4th grade...we thought we were shitting in tall cotton then. Had that TV until I was around 21, back when people didn't just replace TV's for just because's.

 

[Engineer]

We didn't even have a color TV when I grew up.

Being in rural KY, we didn't have cable until I was in my teens. Dad ran a ribbon cable to the top of the mountain with an antenna attached to a tree. Picked up three or four stations. They were in color though!

 

[ImpulsE69]

I work with one such company that has taken the philosophy that they will solely market towards this group and the others will follow. Seems like the focus right now is purely on millennials as if they somehow have the greatest amount of spending power and everyone wants to be like them.

But isn't everything pointing to many millenials either not having or not spending money except on certain things? Not only that they have even less brand loyalty than the last generation.

 

[Oyeve]

bought a then new atari 800. I was about 15. I was a full fledged adult when PC started. Went through 4 years of college with pen and paper and occasionally a typewriter. I still get hand cramps 35 years later.

 

[sdifox]

I remember b&w crt tubes packed in crate and straws :biggrin:

 

[Capt_Kob]

Man, i remember when my dad would tell me about writing papers on a typewriter. ouch. I mean, his entire working career writing reports was on a typewriter. I just can't imagine...

 

[Meghan54]

Grew up in the fifties, and sixies, so um yeah I'm on the without side.:'(

Same with me, although we were the first on our block to get a color TV and an 8-track player.

Did get to play with some interesting computers back in the early '70s, tho...at the Pentagon and at the Army Material Command HQ. In hindsight, should have seen what was coming and focused on that instead of going into the medical field. Computers remained a fascination and hobby.

 

[CZroe]

My first color TV was in the '90s in my mid teens. Grew up with some tiny K-Mart-branded TV that was clearly made by Samsung/Goldstar.

 

[Oyeve]

We got our first color TV I 73.19 inch job that weighed 150 lbs.

 

[sdifox]

We had Sony Beta vcr. Top loader with knob tv tuner :biggrin:

 

[IronWing]

Man, i remember when my dad would tell me about writing papers on a typewriter. ouch. I mean, his entire working career writing reports was on a typewriter. I just can't imagine...

It blew. The Kaypro with daisy wheel printer was so much mo better. Text formatting was a lot like writing in raw html where one would type the formatting code directly into the document flow and the software would interpret them upon printing. You never knew if you screwed up until you printed. That's why we bought paper by the case. Still better than typewriters though.

 

[sportage]

I have a better question...
How does anyone get by today that refuses to have anything to do with either or?
I know two middle aged males that have no idea how to use a computer, tablet, or own a cell phone.
No, they are not poor drooling retarded souls by any means, they just insist and prefer the old reliable land-line, snail mail, and their mass of catalogs for ordering anything.

We can talk film, and I can look up anything and everything in three seconds thru IMDB.com, as my two friends flip through a three inch book to look up the same information.
And even that info is never current and quite outdated.

I really consider them both to be quite handicapped.
And they have absolutely no interest at all with even giving this technology a shot.
It isn't the cost nor the time involved, its just... well, I really don't know what it is.

 

[SearchMaster]

I'm 48. I saved up all summer when I was 13 for a Commodore VIC-20 - my dad paid me $5 to mow our 0.75 acre yard with a push mower (of course), and I also had a job at the local pool cutting their grass and weed eating for like $2.10/hr (as a non-profit they didn't have to pay the $3.35 min wage). I also sold programs at the University of Tennessee for a $0.10 commission per program - I would usually earn $5-$10 per game plus free admission. Then a couple of years later I worked at the concession stand of that same pool and upgraded to a Commodore 64. We didn't have Internet but did use the 300 baud modem to connect to local BBSes (bulletin board systems).

I was a Comp Sci major in college. We had email and a semblance of internet but WWW wasn't invented until after I left college. When I got my first job in '89, I bought a PC clone and signed up with CompuServe and used one of them, AOL, or Prodigy for about a decade.

So I guess you'd say I grew up without Internet but with computers. I couldn't afford a printer until my junior year of high school though so I used a typewriter until then. A lot of my teachers would not accept dot-matrix printouts either for some reason so I still used a typewriter for most of high school.

 

[z1ggy]

At around age 8 my family got a PC. I'm not sure when we got internet, but I know by age 10 we had AOL and basic email I think.

Got my first cell phone at age 15, which was a basic flip phone, no color screen, etc.

Now my young toddler cousins have iPads... -_-

 

[IronWing]

A lot of my teachers would not accept dot-matrix printouts either for some reason so I still used a typewriter for most of high school.

I had a couple teachers with that hang up. One teacher would only accept papers typed on the school's pool of IBM Selectrics. They viewed it as doing their students a favor by forcing them to learn the "industry standard" method of preparing documents. Everyone else, students and other teachers, seemed to understand that the typewriter was doomed.

I have a better question...
How does anyone get by today that refuses to have anything to do with either or?
I know two middle aged males that have no idea how to use a computer, tablet, or own a cell phone.

I have no patience for this in the workplace. Off the job, use cuneiform, I don't care. But there is almost no one left of working age that should be computer ignorant. Computers have been in the workplace their entire working lives. This isn't some new-fangled fad and computers are so much easier to use now than when they started their careers they should giggle every time they boot up and not have to swap disks.

 

[TXHokie]

I'm 48 now so didn't get exposed to computers until high school in the early 80s. My first computer was an Atari 600XL. I remember working minimum wage for weeks after school at $3.35/hr and saved up $120 so I could upgrade it to 16K. Spent hours typing those programs at the back of computer magazines.

I did try to avoid computers by not studying CS in college because I didn't want to be sitting on my butt all day staring at a monitor. But there's no escape, I now make a living sitting on my butt all day staring at 4 monitors and a couple of tiny mobile screens.

 

[pauldun170]

Didn't bother with computers until my early twenties. Got my first one in 1997-1998 timeframe.

 

[Red Squirrel]

We had Sony Beta vcr. Top loader with knob tv tuner :biggrin:

Never seen a beta but I did grow up with VHS. DVDs still feel new to me, and that makes me feel old.

I do remember knob TVs though they were considered older at that point, but still around. I recall one at the cottage that you needed to use a fork to change the channel because the knob was missing. That was a typical fix. Or playing with the antenna to try to get better reception. There was always 1 channel that was decent, 1 was super snowy with only sound, and the other one was just news in French, and also very snowy.

 

[FeuerFrei]

I was sans computer until I was 20. I'd used ones in the college computer lab for the prior 2.5 years though. I remember accessing the web there, with Netscape, and writing down URLs I found interesting on paper, printing out pics of Kate Moss in B&W. A year after I got my first computer (Jan. 1996) I managed to get online with the help of a friend. The internet was hitting its stride there in the mid-90s.

Heading into college my major was undeclared, and I'd barely even touched a computer. But my first year there I had a Intro to Computer Programming course. That's when I figured out what to major in.

I actually learned to type on a typewriter in high school.

 

[Drako]

I actually learned to type on a typewriter in high school.

Same - probably the most useful classes I took in high school.