Am I the only Zoomer? I see a lot of “I remember”-type responses, so I have to wonder.
There are dozens of us, dozens!
I’m in that weird group that’s between Gen-X and Millennial. I’ve seen us called Xennials or the Oregon Trail Generation.
Was Oregon Trail really that huge?
It really was. It was a time when most didn’t have computers at home. Once a week you’d get to go down to the computer lab and play educational games from MECC. Oregon Trail being the most popular of the bunch.
About twice a week we would go to the computer lab filled with Apple IIes. Usually we had to play Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or some other game to reenforce whatever we learned in class. After we finished the game in the lesson plan, we could then play whatever educational game we wanted. Oregon Trail was a popular choice because nothing was funnier than having the game say a classmate had died or broke a leg. And the hunting and rafting mini games were the closest to arcade games.
Also keep in mind that the only exposure most of the teachers had to a computer were the mainframe terminals in the school’s office or the computer lab. MECC put together a lot of software and training for teachers. A school building out an Apple II based computer lab with a bunch of MECC software was as close to turnkey as they could get at the time. The documentation for Oregon Trail or Odell Lake gives you an idea of what it was like.
http://www.mecc.co/history/the-oregon-trail---a-157/mecc_a-157_oregon_trail.pdf
http://www.mecc.co/science/odell-lake---a-192/mecc_a-192_odell_lake.pdf
To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.
I’m 29!
Millennial, I guess.
Xennial here! Had friends with Atari 2600s, first childhood console was an NES, and first home computer was a used Atari 800XL.
Oh, and my first school computers in small-town Ontario were Commodore PETs and ICONs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICON_(microcomputer)).
Wow, go Ontario Ministry of Education.
RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.
The first operating system I used was windows XP (:
Xennial!
First computer I used in school was an Apple IIe with a 720kb, 5.25" floppy drive.
First computer at home was a Tandy 1000. Still out in the garage, I think.
Millennial here. Started on a garbage picked pentium 2 that I ran DOS on.
A computer is would be a good find in those days. Did you have to do much to get it running?
PSU and RAM had to be replaced. Garbage picked those too.
Learned some language (I don’t know if it was Basic or other) on an Apple II at school in fifth grade. Asked for a family computer for xmas and was disappointed that we got a Mac IIsi because I couldn’t program it. 80MB HD. Everymac.com says 2 or 5MB of RAM.
SCSI! Back when data cables were huge and included terminators and channels or whatever. Stop making things so damn convenient and let us work our asses off to plug things in. /s
Shit, I went through the same thing with learning Basic on an Apple II and never being able to acquire(rarely even encountered) one of the right models to use what I had learned after I left that school. Lusted after the IIc for a hot minute, let me tell ya.
Starting my fourth decade on this rock. Distressingly pale… My boys are into trying to fix and upgrade the consoles & PC’s they’ve grown up with, plus a couple old PowerPC G4 & G5 Macs I snatched up a few years ago, so we’ll see where that goes.
Worry not I am also a fellow Zoomer.
I always enjoyed retro technology either because I didn’t use to get the latest stuff right away or because there’s a certain charm to it that still grabs my interest.
@CanadaPlus I’m 54. If you’re into the generation markers, I’m a Gen X. We don’t get your generation’s jokes and we’re totally comfortable with that.
Wife bad? I’m sorry, are we being catty? Haha.
@CanadaPlus See…
Xennial. Grew up memorizing phone numbers, using 1-800-COLLECT to get picked up from the mall, and typing basic programs from magazines into qbasic.
I remember xp… Thanks about it
I’m a millennial. First computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 with extended color basic. Then a C64 (which was sort of disappointing since extended color basic was way better than anything on the commodore, but the games were much better), and then I started with an 8088 with a herc monochrome monitor and no hard drive and only went up from there.
