Why early-'80s babies are different than other millennials.

Old fart here. Born 1966. So old I remember when there was no such thing as pocket calculators or digital watches (I had a kiddie slide rule), let alone desktop computers or internet.

I experience a LOT of computer history. My first computer was a homebrew I soldered together myself. Computers didn't have modems then. I still remember being blown away by my first floppy drive. I didn't have to type in a program every single time I wanted to run it anymore. I could store stuff. Whoa.

I remember the first modems. "300 baud. Transmit data faster than you can type!" I remember sneakernet, sharing files by exchanging floppies. I remember having a computer and not being able to get online as that didn't exist yet. Then the BBSs....that blew me away. Then command-line internet, no GUI, more like a worldwide BBS. That again blew me away--the single largest repository of files and information I had ever encountered.

And the internet offered something else, even before the World Wide Web; the ability to interact with people, at no extra cost, all over the world--no per-minute long-distance charges or TransUnion telegram charges. I always wanted to learn french but never really had access to french speakers, until now.

My first chatroom was a french-canadian room that spoke french. Knew no french when I started, within 6 months I was happily chatting away with lots of french-speaking friends from many thousands of miles away. And I marvelled at it. This had never been possible before, ever, in human history.

Then came the World Wide Web, browing websites. I still remember Mosaic and Trumpe Winsock. I remember what the web was like when it was still largely dominated by universities and home hobbyists, when webpages weren't stuffed full of ads, let alone popunders and popovers and all that annoying stuff of today.

I remember the awe I felt....one of the very first webpages I ever visited was at CERN, Switzerland. I love science--a visit to CERN was an unaffordable dream--now suddenly I could visit them, read their publications, email people there, right from my own bedroom. Learn nuclear physics. Wow....

Vinyl records, to transister handheld AM/FM radios, to walkman cassette players, to Discman CD players, to a cigarette-lighter sized MP3 Player with far better sound than the $400 (in 1975 dollars) home stereo system I had as a teen...and it holds thousands of songs at once, includes an FM radio and built-in microphone and connects directly to my computer. I can record off the FM, record my voice. My entire music CD collection now shrunk to the size of my thumb. Blown away.

Then, smartphones. Taken for granted by millenials, to me they are still miracle machines whose real potential is very much underused. Does everything my mp3 player can do, and far, far more. Mine has a built in thermometer, built-in GPS and mapping app, built-in barometer. It's an entire television studio, and music studio that fits in my pocket. 32 gigs of storage. Now, I not only can store an entire library of songs in my pocket, but in addition, thousands of books, and hundreds of movies at once, watching it on a screen that is sharper than the $400 high-end television set I used to have in the mid-1990s.

And the apps....aside from the annoyance of freemium, this stuff is amazing, really! MyFitnessPal if you want to lose weight. Interest in astronomy? I've got 2 planetarium apps installed, both use the smartphone's GPS so the display matches the real sky. I have a heartbeat monitor app for my jogging. Clock, calendar, scheduling, contact list, IM apps....games galore. And it's smaller than a paperback book.

And then there's Reddit--which literally changed my life, seriously. I was homeless when I discovered Reddit. Reddit got me out of homelessness. Reddit also helped me to get a car, free (long story). The way it happened, would not have been possible 10 years ago.

It's all familiar now, but it still amazes me. Reddit has a serious dark side. But reddit got me out of homelessness and into a dream life I'd longed for for 25 years. I learn something new on reddit every day.

And yeah, easy to get really turned off by the dark side of all this tech stuff; malware, spam, trolling, cyberbullying, ID theft, and all of that. But I remember too, how much harder it was to learn anything, or do anything, before the internet, how much harder it was to connect to people who could truly help you or who really shared your niche interests and hobbies.

For example, I was into ray tracing since the late 1980s. Never met anyone who ever even heard of it, let alone could teach me how to do it (no public library even knew what ray tracing was), until I was well into my adulthood hanging out at university libraries browsing the academic computer mathematics section. Today, everything you could possibly want to know about ray tracing including source code, is just a quick google search away.

Reddit's huge now. Experts on every single topic imaginable are right here on reddit. Just do a reddit search and within seconds, you'll find them, and can read their posts and PM them right from your own bedroom. Amazing. Still blows me away after all these years.

/r/TrueReddit Thread Parent Link - popsugar.com