The Over 30 Myths

[jackfaire]

News to anyone that's in their 20s when they say you were the first generation to "grow up with the internet" they just mean you were the first to have it from birth not that you were the first ones to ever use it and no one older than you ever has.

A couple of other things. Skaters existed before you too. Gamers too. IN fact every mainstream thing you love was pretty much a thing that pre-dates you.

This isn't directed at all 20 somethings but I just saw a YouTube video where a YouTuber said that she doesn't put Lol in text messages to anyone older than 30 because they won't know what it means. Thing is Lol originated in the chatrooms and message boards back when I was a teenager. And I am in my late 30s. I know that people ten years older than me are as versed in the internet as I am.

I know what an ollie is and I was a skater when you were in nappies. If you are a 20 something or teenager that understands you weren't the first to get into these things good this isn't aimed at you.

This is aimed at the ones who tell me I don't get gaming when I know what it's like to spend all day in an arcade playing game after game and making friends of strangers.

Stop assuming you're Christopher Columbus hell even he wasn't Christopher Columbus.

[KabeRinnaul]

I know what it's like to spend all day in an arcade playing game after game and making friends of strangers.

I'm a bit in between. I grew up in an economically depressed area through the 90s, so arcades were a dying breed for us. There's a new one open out near a major shopping plaza, but back then it was just one room with about a dozen machines at the mall. We didn't really spend all day there — until DDR came to America but you couldn't buy the in-home pads yet.

Now, I do remember getting a PS1 and N64 about the same time and the many, many nights of sleep sacrificed to Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy 8, and Ocarina of Time.

That's about the time I started getting fat, too.

[Racket_Man]

hmmmmm I am in my mid 50's and let me see ........

Role playing games and such --- AAAAHHHH YES D & D (considered the Grand Daddy of role playing games) I first played the actual PAPER based game instead of some computer screen (I am looking mostly at WOW) in the late 1970's

Emoti-cons and shorthand ----- I knew about text emoti-cons back in the early to mid 1980's (computer science and programming major back then) and yes I knew that was a smiley face. shorthand stuff was picked up on BBS's and message boards.

Speaking of on-line.
On-line ------- back in the day (early 1980's and beyond) I did have a modem (300bps YES bps connected to an Apple][+) and had access to a wide world of local (meaning in the same city area as I lived) wonderful sites, BBS's and message boards. Most however were single-user-at-a-time sites unless you went to a premeium site for multi-user stuff. This was way before the internet was known outside universities, and/or government and/or the military.

E-mail ----- the Big Iron IBM machines of the 1960's and 1970's vintage did have a basic e-mail system. all of the universities I attended back then had one or more of these machine or used them in some capacity for admin, or academic.


Overall I have been around and working with or using computers for about 40 years now waaayyyy before some of these "children's" parents were born. I have continuously owned a computer for 35 of those years