this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
385 points (96.8% liked)
Showerthoughts
36249 readers
629 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 most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not to mention that the computer literacy of the youngest generation will literally never be on par with the youngest millennials. I started using windows OS at like 4 years old on windows 95. My first computer classes in school started when I was 6. We had years and years of just typing classes on those dummy keyboards that werent even computers. WPM was an actual marketable skill at that time that they wanted to impart on kids.
Basically younger millennials have been cemented as the most technologically literate people alive. Most of the younger generation have the same level of computer literacy as boomers and are even worse than most Gen X. Far less capable than even elder millennials. We had actual QWERTY keyboards by the time we had cellphones, so we never were part of the T9 goofiness either
Nothing is going to catch up the young adults who grew up as IPad kids, because for those of us a bit older we have been exercising actual computer skills basically since we popped out
As an elder millennial, I believe we are far more computer literate than young millennials.
As a 90's kid, I think we're roughly on-par.
I grew up with Windows (95, then 98), DOS, MacOS 8, 9, and X, and used several Apple II computers at school. I was able to use dial-up on my own by like 7?
Built my first custom gaming PC at 12 or maybe 13. It ran XP, which needed a bit of tweaking to run some of my old DOS games.
Man, I do not miss dealing with Sound Blaster drivers.
Oh boy, sound blaster. As much of a pain getting everything to work back in the day was, I'm also nostalgic for it.
Anyway, generational lines are always blurry. I always find myself identifying with things defined to be part of the generation before or after mine anyway. I would call myself a "90s kid", being born in the 80s, but I count that as an older millennial.
We got our first family computer when I was in grade school. It didn't even have Windows, just DOS. So I first learned the command line. When we later got Windows 3.1, we didn't have a mouse, so I learned to navigate the OS with keyboard only (to this day I have a preference for keyboard navigation). By the time I was in high school I knew how to code, build a computer from parts, etc. And started my life as a pirate with Napster.
My sister is a younger millennial, born in the 90s. By the time she was actively using a computer I think it was probably on XP. She probably wouldn't know what defragmenting is or how to format a drive. But she didn't have to learn that stuff.
As a millennial in general it seems we are the only generation who know how computers work as a rule. We had to help our grandparents and parents generation with every technical problem, and figured the kids of the future would surpass us. But now I have play the same tech support role for my kids generation, because they never learned that stuff either.
I am too. I ran across a yt vid the other day talking about how in the DOS games era apparently there was something called the MT-32, which cost around the equivalent of $2000 USD, but the sound was amazing. Instead of the tinnier output of sound blaster, some DOS games actually had full music tracks in their games.
Still though, think of how much less memorable that sound would be if we didn't have it.
He goes through and compares PC speaker, Sound Blaster, and MT-32 for a bunch of games like King's Quest IV, Monkey Island, Space Quest 3, one of the Leisure Suit Larrys, and even an Indy Jones game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R14XeuTXwaU
The phrase “IRQ in use” is still enough to give me nightmares.
Yeah, changing IRQ addresses for peripherals until everything worked wad fun. /s
Also, some people thought it was black magic that I could hex edit a program's executable to change it from English to Portuguese.
Yeah I think the person you are replying to is somewhat confused. As a younger gen x on the cusp, all of my grade school friends (even those who would not later go into tech) knew how to disassemble and reassemble a PC. We had to scrounge for graphics cards, sound cards, hard drives, peripherals, use DOS. Install drivers. Dialed into BBS’s. Pirated software. We built that campy Web 1.0 shit in the 90s.
I dont understand your qwerty coment I have never seen a device that could be called a computer that didn't have one. Unless you go as far back as the "mini computers" and even some of those had them
I believe that was in relation to phones--they said they never had to use T9 mode on phones that had only numbers, and went straight to qwerty phones.
Thanks. I knew i was missing something
You mean older millennials, which is too say, those who were born earlier.