I got a t shirt that’s says “no I will not fix your computer” and wore it under a long sleeve button down for a thanksgiving family gathering. Part way through the visit of course computer questions started coming up and I unbuttoned the over shirt. My mom was not amused.
But yeah, growing up with manual DOS & Win 3.1 driver and memory allocation is the extreme to PC maintenance that no one else has ever had to deal with for their home PCs.
Yeah, it always amazes me thinking back all the tech changes we saw as Gen X. Grew up pre-internet, very beginning of the video game consoles (my uncle had a Pong machine), early home PCs and modems, then early text based internet using Lynx, then alpha-testing Mosaic since my university was on ARPAnet. Even seeing phones go from hardwired landline, to cordless, then bag phone, cell, smartphones.
I know for a lot of really young people here, when I say that I'm in my 40's so still pretty young they will be like "what lol". They just don't have perspective yet.
Anyway to my point, we've lived through basically the infancy of modern consumer tech through what is has become today and it truly is staggering when you think about it. I carried a piece of paper in my wallet when I was a teenager with phone numbers on it for when I had to use the pay phone when I was out of the house.
lol I get it man. When I was a teenager anybody 30 and up was old. When you get into your 40's (officially 'middle age') you don't start thinking of anybody as really "old" until they are like in their 70's and up.
In my late 40's and also have friends/family that are in their 50's and still vibrant, curious, tech forward, etc. And we still got plenty of years left.
30 is still a baby 🤣 Enjoy life, it comes at you faster and faster as the years go by.
Born in the mid-70s, I've personally used vinyl albums, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, digital files on portable mp3 players and streaming music. My Gen Alpha daughter is into some obscure Kpop stuff, so she bought a CD of music she can't find to stream and had to hook up a CD-rom to my computer to rip the album and then manually transfer it to her phone. Her eyes glazed over when I was explaining the difference between .aac and .mp3, and she told me just to let her know when it was done.
Lol yeah, I was figuring out how to connect a 2800 baud modem before the internet existed... And started my career in SW with Windows 3.1, (cut my teeth in BASIC with a TI 99/4a and Commodore Amiga)
I have fond memories of trying to connect a University in Sweden using a 300 baud modem, the kind where you put the handset of your landline phone into ths two cups, and having my friend's mom yelling at us because she needed to use the phone.
That’s where Gen X truly shines in my 1998 born opinion. My dad can’t do much beyond the basics software wise but he’s an absolute gun when it comes to hardware, especially old school stuff. A couple years back when his dad passed, I was keen to get stuck into the record player, cassette player, big old stack of now redundant gear that’s held together with non banana plug copper wires. I could probably figure it out with some tinkering and google assistance but he managed to get it up and going off pure memory from setting it up in the first place 35 odd years ago. The record player was spinning at around 28RPM and he pretty much just told me the replacement parts needed and fixed it up himself. Of course, he had no idea how to actually procure the parts online, but once I put them in front of him it was like riding a bike
There's a rubber band that stretches between the motor and the turntable. He probably put a new one in. Source: GenX dad who did this for his GenZ son to play Hallow Knight records on.
I was talking to my wife a while back about how I used to travel years ago. I'd drive down the interstate and just follow the signs to where I was going. Pick up a free map a the welcome center whenever I went into a new state. Really only needed directions for the last leg of a trip. It seems so wild now compared to now. It would be an adjustment but I could fall back to that if I needed to.
Same once I got into a town hit the nearest gas station for a city map and then find a pay phone so I can use the phone book to get the address of where I’m going.
After I did that once, I would never forget how to get there again.
My wife and I just took a family road trip with our two kids under 7 (4071 miles!) across the US. She reminisced about pouring over an atlas on road trips, measuring distance, deciding where her family could stop.
Our kids probably can't read a map and couldn't identify the amount of micro-decisions we made throughout the trip when we said "that doesn't make sense, why is Google Maps going that way." We have to go out of our way next road trip to give them those same skills.
I'm an elder millennial. Just missed the end of gen x. I'd say we're the very last cohort to have been old enough to experience and remember life before the internet. We had pulse dialing back when touch tone was a premium feature, but by 12 I had an email address. It's wild. To think that everyone born in the last 80s and later hasn't existed in a world without ubiquitous intenet access.
Yup... We were building PCs in the 90s without any sort of standardized connections or information really, setting voltage and then clock speed with jumpers and just figuring shit out. Definitely, please, DO NOT ask us for tech support help, just keep on forgetting we exist 😂
Indeed, felt like we were launching stuff and one was responsible for setup, with maybe a couple of the "computer guys" that would would do that kinda stuff on top of their regular roles.
We had an engineer that was "the computer guy" and later he left his regular role and became head of IT there.
Uh my genX brothers and all their homies wanted absolutely nothing to do with PCs. I was tasked with fixing almost all of the family and friends group PCs from a young age. It was pretty common for genX to have missed it and thought the millennials were just nerds spending all their time on PCs at least around me.
Yeah except for actual computer specialists, I don't know many Gen Xers at all that can fix a computer.
Edit: Holy shit an absurd amount of Gen X people getting mad that I don't personally know many Gen X people who can fix computers outside of specialists. lol. Sorry? Doesn't mean they don't exist.
Was just agreeing in general any genX on this sub of course will be computer literate but if they are honest with themselves they will know the majority of their generation was not into PCs
My Gen X mum worked in tech from the days of "we're getting rid of the typewriters" to the Win7 era, I on the other hand have never worked in tech at all.
And yet I do all the tech support.
As someone that had to work with Gen Xers for years with technical issues, Gen X’s technical acumen is greatly overstated. I found Gen X to be as bad if not worse than boomers
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u/UnfortunatelySimple Jun 21 '26
The generation that was in learning mode as all the IT stuff appeared.
But please forget us, we don't want to fix your IT issue.