• Pechente@feddit.org
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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 😂

        • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Exactly, so the idea that millennials the generation older than Gen Z are “too young for cassettes” is laughable.

          People born in 1995, and early 1996 are millennials, and billions of cassettes existed around them as they grew up.

        • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Yes! Oh my God, I thought that was a uniquely Australian thing because my partner from the UK had no idea what I was on about. But there was like 2 years in highschool for me where everyone was obsessed with the fitting 3-4 songs on a minidisc.

          Though it helped that you could get actual, good music in cereal box mini discs prizes. I got a Missy Higgins single and played it to death. I want to say it was Sugarcane, but the year doesn’t match so it had to have been Scar or Sound of White. (it exploded in our PC disc drive, mini discs were great at doing that) I don’t even remember the song.

      • j4k3@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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.

        • JoShmoe@ani.social
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 month ago

            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.

            • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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              1 month ago

              It’s crazy how ubiquitous those were. Anyone with a mic for their PC had that exact mic.

            • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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              1 month ago

              Back when all that existed for online voicecomms was ventrilo, i took one of those boom mics and taped it to one of the ear muffs of an analog headset meant for cd players, as I could not actually afford a mic+headset combo.

              Worked for years rofl.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          I always thought zip drives were another term for flash drives because so many people just used the terms interchangably.

          • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 month ago

            Reminds me of how everyone is now misusing the term “ROM” to mean “Storage” when it actually means “Read-Only Memory”. Drives me nuts every time I see it in advertising.

            • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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              1 month ago

              It’s funny to me that things like EEPROM are considered ROM. Like, ok, I can write to it? Read only, huh?

        • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Germany still uses faxes, it’s not surprising at all.

          Tho tbf they’re common in Italy too even in the better universities

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      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.

  • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • Fubber Nuckin'@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • TheWeirdestCunt@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Gen Z is a lot older than you think, early gen Z were around when fax machines were still common. Gen alpha maybe though.

    • Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Wearing one right now. It’s my cue to go drive people to the hospital.

      Also volunteer fire departments are big users.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    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

  • bluewing@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • volvoxvsmarla @lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    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?!”

  • pyre@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    pagers never really caught on where i live but i used to watch American tv shows and be amazed how much they mentioned pagers.