I don’t know, as a millennial I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid. I was in fact familiar with all of those since this old stuff doesn’t just disappear and was still used around me in some capacity.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
323 points (89.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
29282 readers
1460 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid.
Cassettes?
Sorry... Cassettes!?
There's someone out there who is attempting to insult millennials by saying we're too young for cassettes?
What the heck else would we be listening to music on, Brenda? We didn't have discmans, sure they existed but we had kid money, and it wasn't worth it until anti-skip came along in 1997, by which point at 10-15 we already had a cassette collection... so we had walkmans!
2 billion blank cassettes were sold in 1997, 2 billion the year before... those born in 1996 didn't get born into a world where the 2 billion cassettes sold that year magically disappeared before the kid was old enough to form memories.
Cassettes were the best, though CD-R changed the game for custom mix "tapes", I never went back to actual mix tapes after we got the tech to burn cds. Mix tapes were still going around all year levels in my first year of highschool, but it was mostly mix CDs going around when I graduated, and the rich kids were already just swapping usbs. By uni, we'd send each other mediafire links to a zip file full of mp3s.
I can still kind of imagine the sensation of sticking my pinkie finger in a cassettes to rewind when I couldn't find a pen. Though weirdly, I can't remember how I used to rewind VHS's, I can't picture that feeling. I'm guessing I probably used the rewind feature for video more often, and was find hand rewinding my music.
I think the older generations are forgetting how the passage of time works. Also, just how many of us millennials grew up poor with Gen X hand me downs 😂
fun fact people born after 1996 are Gen Z
Born in 91, I had a walkman. Got a disc man when I was like 10, but never used it because a, it skipped like a mother fucker it I was walking, and b, cassettes were so much cheaper. I used to listen to books on tape from the library while walking around my town. My mom was a badass who replaced all our batteries with rechargeables and I would even listen to them while sleeping using the walkman instead of the stereo haha
Also, I never rewound a vhs by hand, always used the VCR or the dedicated tape rewinder shaped like a racecar haha
load more comments
(4 replies)
I see your slide projector and raise you an overhead projector.
I see your overhead projector and raise you a zip drive and a mini disc. I blow my NES cartridge to bid adieu to you.
I bet a zip drive could blow their minds. The mini disc and nes cartridge wouldn’t even phase them. Stuff like that are too iconic.
I bet a zip drive could blow their minds.
Show the Blue Yeti streaming generation the old boom mics we had. The ones that looked like refueling probes.
Lol I remember my dad being so excited when he got one of these for our windows 95 PC that he had us record something for it and told us all about how advanced it was.
It's crazy how ubiquitous those were. Anyone with a mic for their PC had that exact mic.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
They are still considered essential in German schools.
Germany still uses faxes, it's not surprising at all.
Tho tbf they're common in Italy too even in the better universities
load more comments
(1 replies)
But unlike cassette tapes (that were still quite popular if you were an earlier millennial, plus Guardians of the Galaxy) slide projectors that are often shown in many movies and TV shows (and again, used in school when millennials where there) and vinyl that had made a big resurgence and is still sold today; pagers were pretty much extinct in the US by the time the first gen z kid came into existence.
Obviously, some of them will know what they are, but I'd bet like half wouldn't.
Gen Z is a lot older than you think, early gen Z were around when fax machines were still common. Gen alpha maybe though.
Fax machines are still in big use. Source, am an attorney without a fax machine and it's a major pain in the ass because all older attorneys use them.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Gen z here. I was not around in the 80's or 90's, but everything people describe as being from the 90's and some stuff from the 80's was just my life in the mid 2000's. I definitely know what pagers are. Like hell, we had a stack of floppy discs at home and my first computer had a floppy disc reader. I used to play duck hunt on my dad's nes and super Mario Land on my own Gameboy. That stuff doesn't just disappear at the turn of the decade.
floppy disc reader
ok mr fancypants how about I call it a flopper? How bout that
Everyone knows they are called flippy flops. Gosh
Yeah yeah you know what i mean
load more comments
(2 replies)
Pagers are still widely used in the medical field, especially, for surgeons.
Wearing one right now. It’s my cue to go drive people to the hospital.
Also volunteer fire departments are big users.
Not true, I heard they're blowing up.
I think those are the "recent events" OP is referring to
nope, I heard about it before in:
-
school
-
steins:gate
-
and from richard stallman himself
+ I kinda knew what they were from idk where
but regarding gen alpha, you're probably right
Born just on the cusp of Gen z, so I'm debatably a zoomer. But weren't pagers a big thing in hospitals for a long time? I certainly saw them while watching scrubs as a kid.
Still are.
I'll have you know we've watched the 90s sitcoms
Alpha, maybe, but zoomers definitely not.
I doubt it, even if they've never seen one in real life, they talk about it a lot in all medical dramas.
I hate pagers. I carried one everyday all day and night. My life was ruled by one 24/7/365 for over 20 years. First as a volunteer EMT and firefighter then as a full time medic. Just listening and waiting for those tones to drop.
I can still hear them.
Ive never personally used or seen a pager in person but I've watched enough videos on old technology to know what a pager is. Also I have fond memories watching VHS tapes, using a CRT monitor, and I personally still use DVDs on my Thinkpad T440p.
Dude I was born in the early 90s and even I assumed "Pagers" was something I am not familiar with when I read the news. The name of a city? A guy? Some ethnic group? Some new military car? At some point I thought the news outlet just meant Prague (especially since I read it in German news first). I never would have guessed they literally meant pagers. Took me like 2 news report headlines and 4 mentions on lemmy to be like "oh wait what for real?!"
Even as a younger millennial they were barely in my life. My mom had one when I was in elementary school for work, and other than that I just know beepers from medical shows and Dennis, the beeper king, from 30 Rock. Technology is cyclical.
Millennials at least had media that were still active that used pagers. For example, any kid growing up with Hey Arnold (1996, the final cutoff year for a millennial roughly), you would get introduced to Big Bob's Beepers which is literally just a store that sells pagers.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Brings me back to my HS hell in the 90s. That's when they banned pagers lol. They also outlawed underaged smoking in my state and you never heard so much bitching lol
pagers never really caught on where i live but i used to watch American tv shows and be amazed how much they mentioned pagers.
I wondered about this as a tactic. Like doesn't a pager really limit the age group / demographic you can target?
Not really. They're using them because they're untrackable (one way pagers only receive data and never send anything). That's quite important if your enemy has laser guided bombs and a complete lack of empathy for civilian lives.
"You make me wanna throw my pager out the window "
view more: next ›