this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Born in 85 and had the internet since "at least" 5 years old? How many people are you thinking had internet in their home in 1990...?
In 95 it wasn't super common, and didn't really even start to explode until after 98...
Also, people are even less tech savvy now than they were then. It's becoming a real problem and is only seeming to get worse.
Also also no one is having kids at 18 anymore.
That said don't underestimate the tech saviness of Gen X, they may not have had a PC at home growing up but I'd say a lot of them were still able to hop on board, unlike boomers.
Scary thing is gen x is more likely to know how tech works than gen z is...
I'm GenX and since computers used to need more work, and my career followed the rise of computer software, I like messing with it. I am still often tech support for my millennial age kids, but the younger set (high school and college now) are outpacing me, especially the 19 year old. I maintain the home network but the 19 year old sails the seas for content, never needs my help with anything tech related, and can often help her older sisters with their questions now.
I would say the difference between us is that the younger ones seem to believe everything will work by itself, I believe most things can be fixed (and am delighted when it just works), the middle ones do not believe either of those things.
Yeah, they got their dates badly messed up. OTOH, being tech savvy has virtually nothing to do with being a responsible parent and understanding that the internet is full of stuff that's wildly inappropriate for children.
The problem with that is a vast majority of parents aren't responsible anymore and rely on outside systems to protect and raise their kids. :(
Yeah even mid-90's "the Internet" started with a doodadootdootdadadoot and wasn't exactly fast for the vast majority of little. Early 28.8kbps came out around '94-95, and real-time video of decent quality wasn't so much a thing. More like RealPlayer buffering.
That said, there was still plenty of janky stuff around. BBS's weren't uncommon even before that and generally had people uploading all sorts of stuff. Porn was plentiful, though you often had to wait upwards of a minute for that file to load and see if there were actual boobs.
Newsgroups were full of weird groups as well as fairly normal ones where the occasional troll would post nasty stuff.
You could definitely still run across predators hanging around in various places. IRC had tons of them, and A/S/L is a pretty well-known intro to this day. There were some video chats, though it would have been a pixel, low-FPS mess.
Nowadays the internet is faster, more connected globally and with more people. There's still terrible shit but I don't know that it's any more unexpected/unavoidable than back in the 28.8 days. Parents should be aware and children should be educated on how to be safe online, and platforms should do their best to stem abuse but that's not really an easy thing without style pretty strict ID requirements, which are often strongly resisted for privacy reasons.