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
Gen X would have had to program everything themselves at one point, because there was no internet and no portable storage media, so when you got a game or program at a store, it was the source code and you had to type it all in, and possibly fix bugs and errors along the way.
We had portable storage. Magnetic tape and paper. Floppy and hard drives existed but were gor the most part out of the reach for consumers
I understand however the c64 usually had a floppy when bought in the states
Spending 7 hours copying code from a magazine only to find you did a dumb on line 538 was a magical experience
Born between '65 and '80? I'm from the lower half of that age bracket and I never did that even once. Knowing the magic incantations to load the game from tape to memory, yes.
Typing in was never "a thing" in the sense that yes, people did it, magazines had these pages of code, but there have been popular consumer friendly ways to load software right from the start. The start being the start of mass adoption of home computers.
load “jumpman”, 8, 1
Press play on tape…
I’m a millennial and I did it more than once on hardware older than I was, but because I wanted to, not because there were no other options.
I remember typing in BASIC programs for my commodore from a magazine. It actually did teach me quite a bit about coding.
It wasn't everyone in the entire generational cohort working from first principles to build a massive network. You're describing a tiny fraction of the modern tech sector doing work that was far more electrical than comp sci within a sector that was primarily academic and heavy industrial.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Gen X cohort was still learning to use slide rules and practice pre-Excel accounting standards, when they weren't just... pouring concrete or welding car parts or cleaning out chemical drums with pressure hoses.
You're describing a career path that was in the low hundred thousands back in the 1990s, which has swelled to the millions in the 2020s. And even then, we're talking about a workforce in the hundreds of millions. The vast majority of Americans have never been techies and never will be.
I'm talking about home computing; not even for jobs.
Beginning of genx is close or a few years after beginning of internet.
It wasn't something Joe Random could use even decade or two after, but just mentioning for correct perspective.
That is technically true. It would be more accurate to say world wide web didn't exist.