this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I barely knew that minidiscs were a thing when they were contemporary.
faze, not phase
Spelling it this way is just a phase.
I always thought zip drives were another term for flash drives because so many people just used the terms interchangably.
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.
It's funny to me that things like EEPROM are considered ROM. Like, ok, I can write to it? Read only, huh?
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
Hell, I'm a millennial and I had a professor at college maybe five years ago who used an overhead because he refused to figure out how to use PowerPoint with the computer projector.
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 😂
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
Well the cool kid in class had a minidisc!
I got my first MiniDisc in 99, when I was 19. It was Panasonic off eBay, and it was fucked. So I got my second MiniDisc in 99 when I was 19. THAT one was a Sony, and was rock solid.
I wish I could have afforded one in ‘96, because then I might have got more use out of the tech before MP3 strutted up and pantsed it.
I had a portable laser disc player. Lots of people thought I was a pizza delivery guy just jamming out to magic pizza tunes. It had to be held level
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.
fun fact people born after 1996 are Gen Z
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.
I was born in 2001 and I still used casettes when I was a kid
FYI it’s called a “record”, or music could be “on vinyl”. They were never referred to as “vinyls”.
Also VCRs were never called “VHS’s”
Here in the UK they weren’t often referred to as a VCR, or even a VHS, to be honest. It was always “the video player”. Even if it was a recorder. At least that was my experience.
I’m an annoying millennial I call em acetates cause I figure what they were called in the 40s or thereabouts is good enough for me see. Now I’m off to my ether frolicking and ice cream social daddy o or watever.
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.