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OLDER crowd (20+)? WTF?

S

seenett

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 4, 2007
200
25
This is not an iPhone thread per se, but another thread in this forum got me thinking... (mods please move if appropriate).

So....am I (at age 41) way out of my demo here on MacRumors?? I know this board skews young but....

In high school, there were no computer classes. I believe typing was an elective, however.

In college, I took a class in MS-DOS. The Computer Center had brand spankin' new PC/XTs with monochrome amber displays - huge upgrade from green/black! 1200 baud modems were the latest and greatest . It was a true technological break-thru when I could IM a friend in another building (IF they were logged on to a terminal) via the command prompt. Think "War Games" and Joshua: Want to Play a Game?
 
Well I'm 55 and there were no personal computers when I was in college. My first 2 years all computer programming was via punch cards (boxes of them), and my junior year we got to use teletypes with paper tape punches. We got 'glass teletypes' (crt dumb terminals) my last year, and only seniors and graduate students got to use them. How times have changed!
 
I'm almost 29 and in high school, we had typing and Computers in Business, in which we learned how to use Word and Excel. This and we had a few old Apple compturs which I despised in our Journalism class. This was way before OS X, I think it was OS 8 or so days. And AOL was THE internet provider. But I don't consider myself old, just older than the 14 year olds that crowd most forums.
 
I'm 27, and even for me, back in Junior High things were similar. Only computer class was typing. Using some Mario type learning software and other apps. Messed with some simple paint program, which printed to a dot matrix printer.

Earlier than that, in elementary school we had old macs, one in a classroom, that all we used for was Oregon Trail.

I did happen to get my hands on digital contact/notes mini computer in Junior High. About the size of a sunglass case, but thinner, and flipped open with a simple text display and keyboard. Had a feature that could flip through note pages insanely fast. So all I did with it was make animations using text characters. I bought it cheap from someone and knew it had to be stolen, and eventually it was stolen from me, the circle of life.

In High School, pretty much recall pagers being around. I can't imagine what life is like as a kid now a days with literally the entire internet in your pocket, camera, music, sms, movies. Just messing with a graphing calculator was the fun thing back then for me. But in High School the computers were much better, still, I recall number munchers out of all things. They had a Sim City 2000 competition once.

And even the internet was new during my time. My first time on the net was 1996 I think, maybe a year earlier. I had a Mac Performa 575, or was it a Power Computing Clone. But all I had was a modem from an earlier computer that was 2.4k speed. Global something it was called. I'd type in a page and leave the computer for 5 minutes. And as the internet was popular for information, back in 2000 I focused my final speech in Speech class at junior college on how e-commerce was going to be huge for buying things on the internet and to not be afraid of your credit being stolen.

I guess when we get older and kids have iphones wired into their brains, we'll be saying: "well in my day, all we had was a single pay phone at school, took things called coins. And if we wanted news about entertainment, politics, video or music, we had to walk miles to the nearest magazine, video or music store, in the snow, barefoot. Oh, and to send a text message, we had to use pencil and paper and wait days for it to arrive"
 
Yeah, I saw that thread, too. I felt like a fossil. :rolleyes:

I'm almost 39. My oldest child is older than some of the posters here. My first computer class was in college, and I learned how to program simple stuff in DOS. Before that my computer experience was with a Commodore 64, which used programs that played off audio cassettes. :) My dad bought it because he likes to keep up with technology--he was a math major/physics minor.
 
i had an amiga 1200 that i shared with my 2 brothers. I bought my own first computer when i was at Univeristy it had a massive 233Mhz CPU come along way now with my shiny Mac Book Pro. Oh and I'm 25
 
TimothyB said:
I'm 27, and even for me, back in Junior High things were similar. Only computer class was typing.......
Click to expand...

I'm 24, and while still really young, can definitely tell a difference between myself and my 18 year old sister in this regard.

I think people in their mid to late 20's are in an interesting generation because we were sort of on the edge of this technology revolution. I too in elementary and junior high had very minimal computer exposure. I remember a couple of educational games in 5th grade (Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail) which were as fancy as it got. Heck, due to cost, my family didn't have a personal computer until I was a sophomore in high school. My senior year in high school I finally took a couple of programming classes (visual basic and C++) and fell in love. Computers were just then taking off in the personal market, with prices becoming quite reasonable. Even then, we were talking floppy drives and such.

In college, and now graduate school, I have become obsessed with technology, namely Apple products. The iPhone is no different. You can see in my signature what machine I have. It is crazy to think how far things have come in my short time since high school. While I may know more than my sister in regards to technology, computers, programming, etc.... they most definitely seem to come to her a bit easier than they did to me. I think perhaps because she has grown up knowing nothing else. It is weird to begin this transition where high schoolers start to think of me as the "older crowd."
 
I had to walk outside and bond with some dirt...

after reading this. I spend more time usually reading the posts here instead of posting myself. Yes, I am 40 (still find it hard to believe on given days). I do feel fortunate. Although they were crap, my high school had TRS-80 Model IV's. My first computer was the TRS 80 Color Computer I. Instead a car, I was more thrilled getting an Apple II e for my 16th birthday. By the time started college in 1985, the computer lab had half Apple II e and half with a computer I still refuse to use today. I still miss my Apple II e. Such is life.
 
I'm 29. At school, typing was an elective - but it still involved electric typewriters. In high school my school did buy macs and I remember the HyperCard classes fondly :) I didn't even hear of email until I got to college.

Like BlueCynicalMoon, I miss my old Apple IIe.
 
I am 30 and been into computers since I was like 8 or so.

My first computer was a commodore 64, followed by a 286. First computer I used however was an 8088 XT.

Early on, we had computer "labs" which was mostly Apples IIs. I remember getting booted out of the class in ~4th grade for "hacking". I scared the crap out of the teachers when I started to write code in BASIC.

Another time a teacher made the major mistake of telling me that if I thought I was so smart, why don't I teach the computer class. Take a wild guess what happened. The next day I was teaching the class Pascal.

For the most part, I wasn't allowed near the computers without strong supervision because I more or less scared the entire teaching staff.

One day I tried to figure out the number of hours I have spent in front of a computer. I quickly realized the result would be a rather large depressing number :D
 
seenett said:
commodore 64? Sweet! My first computer was a Vic-20.
Click to expand...

Those were the days - typing out programs letter by letter from computer magazines, only to find you had made a mistake somewhere so it wouldn't run...

38 here - no computers at all in High School - I remember my friends dad bringing the first Mac home from work - in an Apple carry bag - was so impressed that this computer was PORTABLE - you could take it anywhere!!

Since when are 20-something s considered "older" anyway (except by 15 year olds) - hell, 40 is not old these days...:)
 
seenett said:
This is not an iPhone thread per se, but another thread in this forum got me thinking... (mods please move if appropriate).

So....am I (at age 41) way out of my demo here on MacRumors?? I know this board skews young but....

In high school, there were no computer classes. I believe typing was an elective, however.

In college, I took a class in MS-DOS. The Computer Center had brand spankin' new PC/XTs with monochrome amber displays - huge upgrade from green/black! 1200 baud modems were the latest and greatest . It was a true technological break-thru when I could IM a friend in another building (IF they were logged on to a terminal) via the command prompt. Think "War Games" and Joshua: Want to Play a Game?
Click to expand...



Hello everyone, I'm the thread starter of the thread that this one is based off of:)


In my opinion, whether your 2 or 90, learning about tech in general always keeps you in the demographic, because thats what our world depends on everyday. So to the thread starter, no your not out of it at all! :D
 
seenett said:
This is not an iPhone thread per se, but another thread in this forum got me thinking... (mods please move if appropriate).

So....am I (at age 41) way out of my demo here on MacRumors?? I know this board skews young but....

In high school, there were no computer classes. I believe typing was an elective, however.

In college, I took a class in MS-DOS. The Computer Center had brand spankin' new PC/XTs with monochrome amber displays - huge upgrade from green/black! 1200 baud modems were the latest and greatest . It was a true technological break-thru when I could IM a friend in another building (IF they were logged on to a terminal) via the command prompt. Think "War Games" and Joshua: Want to Play a Game?
Click to expand...

I had an Apple II back in 1980 at age 11, and graduated into IBM PC/DOS, later windows, then into MAC OS X beta, etc.. I've seen this age come, and go.. I'm 39.. I consider myself "middle, younger age".. ;)
 
I am 52. I had one of the first BSCS ( BS in Computer Science) degrees given in 1978. It was the first semester it existed at NAU. As far as I heard at the time only MIT and Berkely also had a BSCS.

My college computer had 98K TOTAL memory. That ran the whole campus. What they called a Personal Computer was $100 and delivered as a box of chips you wired together yourself just to get it to run simple counting programs if you were lucky to get it to work.

I bought the first Macintosh model that came out and I think I was the first consumer in CA to get their hands on the first Mac Hard Drive. I forget the size but I think it was about 2megs and it cost me about $2,000. I had to use connections at Computerland Corporate to get my hands on it. At the time is seemed like all the memory in the world.

I even got one of the first Newtons (like you did not guess :) )

Now flash forward to the iPhone. I have seen it all and it is the most amazing thing I have ever owned. I used to drag around a cell phone, Ipod, and camera. It does just about everything I would ever need when I am away from home. I did not need to drag a laptop to Europe last summer. I could surf and do all my email from every Hotel Lobby using wifi.

I am excited to get the 3G speeds. I love to use the phone to surf the web while I am waiting for anything when I am out. Now all I need to be totaly content is a decent Texas Holdem card game. :):cool:
 
I hope you don't skew young on here. I see to many posts about people buying iPhones and giving the old one to their wives. I'm assuming nobody under 18 is married, so there are plenty of us "old farts."

I'm 30, and I remember thinking an Apple IIe was badass. It had TWO 5.25" floppy disk drives (TWO, dammit!). I think we were ultra-cool with a screen that displayed 8 colors. Somewhere in there was an Atari 600, which had a keyboard and you could write programs on. Then, looking back, came the uber-suckage of Windows. I remember my dad spending $2000 on some clone that had 3.1 along with a 486 processor that ran at 33 megahertz. Oooooh. I guess at the time it wasn't bad, but looking back I want to find that thing and strangle it. That was during Apple's crappy days (the 1990s) and I wouldn't have been able to play any of the games I had. I remember the awesomeness of the Legend of Kyrandia series and the Hardball baseball games (until they effed it up with No. 6).

Taking a typing class in high school (it was an elective) was the SMARTEST THING I EVER DID. I can type 80wpm with very few errors, and I use Quark Xpress to lay out newspaper pages for my peanuts. Typing that fast lets you be VERY lazy on other things since Quark has a ton of keyboard shortcuts. I can also type of the occasional article that I write (got one tomorrow, woot) and the typing class still pays off. However, I only typed 40wpm in that class. The other half of my speed I gained through using IM and chat apps. I used those a lot in college and kept on getting faster and faster. I feel sorry for the kids who think texting is some awesome form of communication. They don't spell half the stuff right and you get charged for it most of the time. Learn how to type right and use IM on a real computer or just call someone! :)
 
I'm only 21 and can understand what you're talking about to a point.
I remember when the reaches of the Internet were basically whatever you could click to from the AOL home screen.

In middle school I was issued Saturday School for downloading a file from the Internet(which was against school rules). The dean looked at her paperwork to inform me that my story about accidentally clicking something on a page I was browsing couldn't have possibly been true because "the file was 121 kilobytes. I don't know much about computers, but I know something as big as that's not going to download before you can stop it." I just laughed in her face.
 
JBaker122586 said:
I'm only 21 and can understand what you're talking about to a point.
I remember when the reaches of the Internet were basically whatever you could click to from the AOL home screen.

In middle school I was issued Saturday School for downloading a file from the Internet(which was against school rules). The dean looked at her paperwork to inform me that my story about accidentally clicking something on a page I was browsing couldn't have possibly been true because "the file was 121 kilobytes. I don't know much about computers, but I know something as big as that's not going to download before you can stop it." I just laughed in her face.
Click to expand...

Middle school...around 1999? 2000? If you were using 56k, it would have taken a little over 15 seconds.
 
Ah, the old days. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 (with 16K ram pack, oh yes). Then a ZX Spectrum, 48k RAM. Commodore 64. Acorn Archimedes 410 (1Mb RAM!!!) - yes, I was there at the dawn of RISC processors. Acorn RISC PC. Various PCs, them MBP. So no, you're not old. :)
 
Hmmm...my long computer history.

I'm 23 and still in college since I took a hiatus when I was 19. My story might be a little different because my school district always had pretty good funding for technology, and my grandpa worked for a government contractor so he usually had the latest.

I remember when in first grade we were taught how to use the Macs in school. I don't know what kind they were. We were taught how to turn on the switch on the back, how to load the Oregon Trail 5 1/4" floppy disk, etc. Later on I started playing on my grandpa's computer when I was about 5 when Windows 3 was out on his 486. I remember him getting really excited when 3.1 came out. I would draw pictures in paint all day long and he would print them out on his color printer that had tear off dots down both sides to feed it. I remember he got mad at me for printing too many pictures this one time because it was expensive. I printed like 5?

Anyway, so in middle school is when I really started using computers. In 1996 my grandparents bought us a Pentium I MMX 75mhz with 32mb of ram, 4x cdrom, 1.2gb hard drive, 14.4k modem and Windows 95. We didn't get the internet until a few years after that and had a 33.6k modem installed, and finally a 56.6k flex. I also remember my grandpa got one of the early CD-RW's in 1998 and I figured out how to download an nsync song from an ftp and burn it for my little sister for her birthday. Awww...my first pirated cd. It took about 4-5 tries...kept making coasters...because back then they didn't have buffers and we didn't know what was quality media.

In 1996 I remember going online for the first time in middle school. We had to do research on the internet for some native american project. I remember using some gopher search engine that sucked. It was so hard to find info back then. I remember there was this really good native american info site called dickshovel.com and I got in trouble for using that as my source. Hah, wow, I just looked it up and its still online with this funny page, telling teachers to get their minds out of the gutter!! Wow...so in 7th grade 1997 I started working on GBTV, our middle school's tv program. I was one of the animators and made little flash type animations with Macromedia Director 5 and then 5.5. We would do pretty blatant south park ripoffs and my own created characters, duckman and baconman. One of my friends did a star wars ripoff, monkeywars. We had a lot of fun and got to use the latest computers. We even got digital cameras in 1998. It was crazy. I was in the Creative Arts Academy program in the summer and we got the new Pentium III when it came out. I remember using Bryce 3d to make mountain scenes and we thought it was blazing fast at the time. We also had an ATI TV tuner and could make the wallpaper the tv. It was insane at the time. I also remember in 1999 our teacher said we were the first school to get Windows 2000. I don't know if thats true but thats what she told us. We were apparently a part of some trial program. Windows 2000 was awesome back then. I can't believe Microsoft has screwed up so bad since then.

In highschool I took several classes such as videomedia, programming, office and web design. I remember we got some mac g4s and I could never figure them out. I remember there was this nerdy kid who would always talk about how superior macs are, and he kept bragging as he updated the computer to this thing called os x. I had no idea. I thought they were both weird. I took a lot of computer classes. I remember taking qbasic and pascal, which is funny, because those are both super outdated. I also took visual basic and c++. I remember back in those days we would play a lot of games in class and they would keep blocking the sites we loved. So some of us set up proxy servers to get around it. They also started blocking videos, but we changed the permission script files. I remember this one day the internet was down, so I set up a link with terminal services over the local network across town to the other highschool and was able to bridge their internet so that I was the only one with internet in class. We also setup a network share on the M: drive to swap homework files and nobody was the wiser. I even ended up finding our mid-term exam on the network and posted it to the share for everyone to study. It was a good time back then and we never got into trouble. I also built my first computer in 2001...a 1.5ghz P4 beast.

By my senior year in 2003 we started a newschannel with Comcast...Channel 15, Communication for Education. It was local in KC and several schools in the area participated and got funding for equipment. The main satellite hub was at the highschool across town, so I got to drive over there a lot and goof off with my friends there between classes. I was even interviewed live on the local FOX4 morning show. We got to use a lot of the latest stuff. We were one of the first schools to get G5's. I remember I had this PSA project deadline to meet and Premiere 6 on the PC kept crashing and having memory leaks. Thats when I finally switched over to the mac and never had a problem. We also had G5s when I started into college as a graphics designer, but I didn't have as much money then so I built a 3.7ghz overclocked P4 machine in 2004. Then I got a Dell laptop in 2005 when I went back to college because I had forgotten about my past love with the mac by then. Spring '07 I started dating a girl who had a little white macbook and used that a lot. That rehooked me, along with buying the iPhone, and I finally bought my first mac this spring. So I've now come full circle from starting out using a mac in first grade! Now I'm addicted!!

Wow I can't believe I typed all of that. It was fun though and sentimental. It just felt like every year we were always in some trial and learning the newest thing. My generation was always on the cusp of the breaking technology as it was emerging into new markets. I think we are in between because I'm not on the internet all the time and most people my age aren't as addicted. I've just been on more lately because I am looking for a summer job right now so I have lots of free time. But seriously, people like my sister who is 19 are online a lot more. She is addicted to blogging and to texting and I just don't get all of it. So I've never been able to completely identify myself with one group or the other. I generally don't like how new technology is taking over our lives, although I still enjoy it from time to time. Its so hard to figure it all out. I really agree with the 24 year old guy who was posting about this also. We are stuck in between.
 
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