As a 90s kid I definitely feel like there’s such a huge generational gap in the past 20 years though, so much changed so rapidly since then.
Like watching MP3 players come and go. And the transition of videotapes to discs to streaming. Or watching nobody own a cellphone to the entire world not being able to go anywhere without one. As well as throwaway cameras to everyone having one in their pockets.
Pre 00s and after is such a difference in just about everything. I wonder what the pre 10s and after will be like.
We literally went from doing essays in a library to using internet and printers (at first my teachers even forbid students from using Internet as a source), heck I even wrote on a typewriter a few times
“Wikipedia is not a source, anyone can edit it! You can’t be certain anything on there is true!!”
Now wikipedia is probably the last bastion of decent information online. At minimum, a well-souced article gives you an excellent starting point.
Remember to donate to Wikipedia if you haven’t, we desperately need them to remain independently funded
It’s been fast like that since the end of WWII.
My parents were born in the early 60s and they saw records replaced with eight tracks and then cassettes and then CDs and then mp3s and now streaming.
Answering machines were a novelty when my parents were children and now we have cell phones.
The internet wasn’t even something you could have imagined in your wildest dreams in the 1970s.
Some people did imagine it in the late 60s or early 70s… The first remote connection to a digital computer was at Dartmouth College in 1940, first commercial modem 1950, and Dartmouth time share system in the 1960s. Your statement is correct, though I definitely couldn’t have imagined it, but thankfully, some people did.
This all hits home. And for me, in the rural US at the time, the world got a lot bigger.
We went from expensive long-distance telephone calls and local BBSes to instant access to everyone and everything.
We went from 2-lane roads to affordable(ish) flights and direct highways.
Despite where we may be today, as an early adopter of everything, I’m happy to have had a front row seat to all that.
Really though, we were at the center of the tech boom growing up. VHS to live streaming. Physical media is retro in such a short time. It’s not even necessarily the advancements on their own (which saying were massive may be an understatement) but also the implementation and sociatal acceptance.
We went from “don’t talk to people on the internet, don’t meet with them, don’t give out personal information”, to literal non-stop blogging of all our life events to as many people who care to see it. This is not a lamentation, merely a statement to express how far things have changed in effectively one generation.
It moved so fast that even most 90s kids don’t have agreeable substance for “the way we did it” since it changed and developed so fast. People two years apart in the 90s can have radically different views of what it was like because it didn’t stay that way for any length of time. VHS to DVD to Blueray and streaming. XBox, Kinect, to VR. Calling, to Email, to AOL, to text, to smartphones and message apps. It was a wild burst of tech that was astonishing and ground shaking.