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Millennials are NOT the "home computer generation", per the article. You've missed the point; the home computer generation were the ZX81/Atari people, who had t

Millennials are NOT the "home computer generation", per the article. You've missed the point; the home computer generation were the ZX81/Atari people, who had to work out how the equipment worked. The "mobile first" people are developers; honestly, users don't give a shit whether developers want to prioritise mobile. And developers aren't users; on the whole, developers understand the tech in ways that modern users don't have the first clue about. That's the same as it always was: the "home computer generation" wasn't a generation; it was a subculture. Most people knew nothing. Now everyone has multiple computing devices, annd they have no idea how they work. Back then, you HAD TO figure out how they worked, or they were useless.

mulmen 4y ago
From TFA: > Scores of people owned what was then called a home computer - those very special machines produced between the late 1970s and late 1990s aimed specifically at the consumer market: ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari, and, overlapping with the business side of things, PC:s and Macs. A lot of us used our machines for little more than playing video games, but even in doing so, many of us developed a very special relationship to our machine in particular and digital technology in general. I believe this relationship to be unique to this particular period in time and that it resulted in a very particular kind of computer user. > We love naming generations and ascribing vices and virtues to them. Boomers. Millenials. Zoomers. I propose that in the overlap between Generation X and Millenials, there is a home computer generation. I was born in the first 20% of the Millennial generation according to Wikipedia. We didn't always have cable and we didn't have a Nintendo until the late 90s but we always had a desktop PC. The first PC I remember using was a 486 that my parents bought from my uncle. He was running a little custom computer shop named after a Clapton album. My first PC memory is playing Pharaoh's Tomb with my Dad and wondering what the incantations on the post-it really meant. I remember how excited Mom was when we got our first computer with a whole encyclopedia on CD-ROM and a hard drive big enough to "hold a library". I got my own PC in the mid 90s. A no-name Pentium. It was a hand me down from Dad's coworker, he made me promise I'd learn something with it. That was my first experience with Linux. Mandrake as I recall. I wasn't old enough to drive. In high school I took a computer tech class, learned HTML, how to build PCs, helped wire the building for Ethernet, and then inherited the journalism lab for my junior and senior years. One of my first jobs was in a local computer shop. I worked for the IT desk at my college. After graduation I did onsite tech support for Dell before starting my career in data engineering. Which is a path that was suggested to me by one of my gaming buddies.
vintermann 4y ago
A millennial is someone who came of age around 2000-2010. I did, turned 18 in 1999, and I grew up with home computers. Early millennial/late gen-X grew up with home micros, later millennial grew up with Windows 95+ PCs (which are plenty complex enough to force you to learn a lot about computers). And yes, it's true not everyone in this generation learned anything about computers. Even in middle school in the nineties in a very developed country, I reckon less than half of my class had a computer at home. But those who had, even outside the "subculture", learned a lot which people generally don't know today.

mulmen 4y ago

From TFA: > Scores of people owned what was then called a home computer - those very special machines produced between the late 1970s and late 1990s aimed specifically at the consumer market: ZX Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari, and, overlapping with the business side of things, PC:s and Macs. A lot of us used our machines for little more than playing video games, but even in doing so, many of us developed a very special relationship to our machine in particular and digital technology in general. I believe this relationship to be unique to this particular period in time and that it resulted in a very particular kind of computer user. > We love naming generations and ascribing vices and virtues to them. Boomers. Millenials. Zoomers. I propose that in the overlap between Generation X and Millenials, there is a home computer generation. I was born in the first 20% of the Millennial generation according to Wikipedia. We didn't always have cable and we didn't have a Nintendo until the late 90s but we always had a desktop PC. The first PC I remember using was a 486 that my parents bought from my uncle. He was running a little custom computer shop named after a Clapton album. My first PC memory is playing Pharaoh's Tomb with my Dad and wondering what the incantations on the post-it really meant. I remember how excited Mom was when we got our first computer with a whole encyclopedia on CD-ROM and a hard drive big enough to "hold a library". I got my own PC in the mid 90s. A no-name Pentium. It was a hand me down from Dad's coworker, he made me promise I'd learn something with it. That was my first experience with Linux. Mandrake as I recall. I wasn't old enough to drive. In high school I took a computer tech class, learned HTML, how to build PCs, helped wire the building for Ethernet, and then inherited the journalism lab for my junior and senior years. One of my first jobs was in a local computer shop. I worked for the IT desk at my college. After graduation I did onsite tech support for Dell before starting my career in data engineering. Which is a path that was suggested to me by one of my gaming buddies.

vintermann 4y ago

A millennial is someone who came of age around 2000-2010. I did, turned 18 in 1999, and I grew up with home computers. Early millennial/late gen-X grew up with home micros, later millennial grew up with Windows 95+ PCs (which are plenty complex enough to force you to learn a lot about computers). And yes, it's true not everyone in this generation learned anything about computers. Even in middle school in the nineties in a very developed country, I reckon less than half of my class had a computer at home. But those who had, even outside the "subculture", learned a lot which people generally don't know today.