Am I the only Zoomer? I see a lot of "I remember"-type responses, so I have to wonder.
I’m in that weird group that’s between Gen-X and Millennial. I’ve seen us called Xennials or the Oregon Trail Generation.
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
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.
Xennial as well. My first home PC was an Epson with 640k and a 3.5 DD disk drive and a "Turbo" button on the front of the case.
I remember getting a kick out of a game that used RealSound, a piece of software for doing voice and other similarly complex sound out of the standard PC speaker (apparently it handled 6-bit PCM audio, though I wouldn't know that at the time).
That game included a card explaining how to improve the audio out of your PC by building a cable to connect the line going to your PC speaker to an RCA cable to connect it to a stereo or boombox. The cable wasn't great at what it did (and better designs had been devised since), but it was pretty simple (if I remember right just some RCA cable, a couple of alligator clips and a capacitor).
Floppy drives have been a recent fascination of mine. A small, semi-disposable soft-robotic hard drive, how ingenious.
I'm a millennial but I also have an interest in computing before my time. The possibility of understanding the computer entices me, whereas modern computing is more interested in understanding me.
I'm in my 20s. I got into retro computing because I used older (Windows 95) computers my parents handed down to me when I was a child and things got cemented and I started looking at even older tech when I started watching YouTube videos covering retro computing.
Alright! It's kind of similar for me, I grew up playing among old towers in our basement, and I still have a supply of retro stuff handed down to me, if I can catch it. I love seeing problems solved in different ways, or even the same way but visibly in old hardware. Today it's all buried under the higher layers of abstraction, and the the other end of gen Z hasn't even used a filesystem necessarily, let alone had to think about the physical layer.
Old fartBoomer here, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.Although I did see some punch cards I never used them. At the time I couldn't afford a computer with punch cards and was too young and inexperienced to work for an organization that had such machines.
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.
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.
Gen Z here. Oldest computer I remember my family having was an XP tower, a Dell Dimension.
I studied computer engineering, and that interest pulled me into retro tech. I love seeing what older hardware is capable of — I’ve got a Pentium laptop that can load old Reddit and stream music over wifi.
There’s a trove of old hardware and software to dig through too with so many unique odds and ends. History and tech worth preserving. One of my favorite projects so far was doing some programming challenges in BASIC on an Apple II. Anything old-tech is fun to me :)
There's a really noticeable difference in motivation between the old and young users here. For you and me, it's conceptual, for a lot of the older users it's pure nostalgia because I guess the concepts aren't new.
Another Oregan Trail generation here.
I'm curious about what's going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I've made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck's Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they're going to think about old tech when they're older. I haven't told them that it's "old" or "retro" yet, so they just think they're normal fun games.
I have two little ones that I’ve made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck’s Playground are their favourites)
And they appreciate it, huh. It makes sense, I guess that's the digital-age version of a kid playing with the box their toy came in. And man, some of those old games really are timeless. If I had some of my own, and they expressed interest, I'd like to try teaching them from both ends of the stack instead of starting in the middle like I did. It was a bit frustrating knowing how to code, but not how to either make a modern-looking application, or how the code was itself working.
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.
