People who are in their 40s now were teens and young adults in the 80s, and are therefore likely to agree that that decade was significant, and I can understand

People who are in their 40s now were teens and young adults in the 80s, and are therefore likely to agree that that decade was significant, and I can understand that (I'm 41). Let me try to give a different perspective, though: Modern times seems to me to have started about when The Matrix came out and Google came along. It's truly amazing to me that we managed to get along without immediate and virtually unlimited access to any information about anything. Being able to just look things up completely changed my life. The internet was qualitatively enormously different when the best search engine was Altavista and most of my time was spent on IRC and Usenet.