Oregon Trail Generation • Hacker News Board

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#21

Post by chrisco255 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

letitbeirie wrote: post #13

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…

Well if it makes you feel any better we spent a whole week on the Dewey Decimal system and how to look up books via index cards. Because computerized indexes and search were rapidly replacing physical lookup, I never ever used that skill again.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#22

Post by alabamacadabra » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

What’s more baffling is using the concept of “generations”, being the idea that everyone born within a certain set of years has a certain experience. Is this not making it obvious that concept itself is without any merit?

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#23

Post by chrisco255 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#24

Post by chrisan » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #7

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.

That would be much better. Otherwise, I'd rather stick with Gen X than Xennial as Millennial has so many negative connotations these days.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#25

Post by philistine » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

sklargh wrote: post #12

rvense wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenin supposedly said "There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen." I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of appar…

My spouse and I have both reflected on our 90s childhoods as periods of functional non-history.

Serious people, after the fall of Communism, expected this to be the end of history. Turns out it was just a boring epilogue.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#26

Post by Telemakhos » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:14 PM UTC

sklargh wrote: post #12

rvense wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenin supposedly said "There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen." I'm ostensibly in this Oregon Trail generation, though as a non-American I've never seen an Apple II in the flesh, and the first time I heard about this game was as the name of a generation. I'm some years older than my wife, and one difference between us is that I have much clearer memories of the 90's as a time of appar…

My spouse and I have both reflected on our 90s childhoods as periods of functional non-history.

Is a period of relative peace (except for the first Gulf War, the Yugoslavian conflict, etc.) and prosperity non-history? Is a time more historical the worse it feels, just like an event is more worthy of news coverage the more death or suffering it causes? What a terrible thing history must be if it is only the story of pain.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#27

Post by salex89 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

codesections wrote: post #10

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?

Sure, technology didn't come to all parts of the world at the same time and/or was not affordable. I was born late 80s in Europe and can relate.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#28

Post by empressplay » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#29

Post by jsonne » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oregon Trail Generation

#30

Post by jsonne » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

codesections wrote: post #10

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?

Yeah I was born in 89 and growing up middle class in a more rural American small town we didn't get internet until the late 90s and didn't use it with any regularity until the early 00s. I got my first laptop when I was going to college in 2008.