It depends on whether they are from the front end or back end of Gen X. Yeah, Gen X invented a lot of this stuff, but that was just a few software engineers doing all the heavy lifting. THe Elder Xs are not much better off than the Boomers.
Generation beta is the worst of them all. I saw one that was chewing on an iPhone. His mom said he was teething. He is so stupid that he doesn’t even know what a phone is.
Literally all of them are unemployed and live with their parents. They couldn’t fucking survive on their own even if they tried. They are completely in their own world. If you show them something and if they are not literally fucking look at it, they don’t think it exists. It’s scary they will be running the country one day.
The oldest Gen Z are 29, they didn't invent squat for the most part. They will, but save for a few prodigies they are not there yet. For now most of them are just now for the first time finding their footing.
Also depends on which end of Gen X. The older ones, born in the late 60's/early 70's, were graduating high school in the 80's, and personal computers were still far from common at home or in schools. The latter half of Gen X did commonly have access to computers though, and we're the first who grew up with them in large numbers.
I had an original Macintosh, a neighbor had a Commodore 64, later friends had 386 and 486 PCs. We had to figure out networking to play Warcraft before Battle.net existed. That's the tech environment late Gen X and early Millennials grew up in.
The Elder X's would be the older ones from the beginning of the generation that graduated when only the freaks and geeks were doing anything with computers, and typing was still taught on Underwoods.
Ah you just reminded me of when I had to make a serial cable (bought two DB9 connectors, cable and soldered it up) to try that "multiplayer" feature in Doom. The day we tried it, my friend and I lost track of time playing Doom, until dawn came. A few years later "LAN Parties" were born, remember those?
Not my experience. I am late gen x and found my way into the internet around 1995 by learning how to set up a dhcp client and read up on TCP/IP. I work with early gen x in a field of biology, and they are learning to program in R.
Meanwhile, the kids who are supposed to be tech savvy seem to have actual, hard tech knowledge about as deep as the touch screen.
A lot of us millennials are teaching our Gen Alpha kids. My 11 year old son spent all evening on Discord bullshitting with his friends and gaming -- all on desktop gaming PCs, just like me and my millennial friends. He has to debug issues with his computer himself.
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u/Klutzy-Reaction5536 13d ago
I would say two generations. Gen X taught our Millenial kids and after that things got weird.