Millennials are ignorant of Rodney King Riots, Desert Storm, Waco / Oklahoma City Bomber (far right domestic terrorism), Newt Gingrich's rise of the 'Party of No', and other such political events of their era. Pop quiz, what is the Cranberries's Zombie song about?
Gen Z however is keenly aware of the problems occurring around them.
I remember the politics of the 90s. It wasn't as happy as others point out here. We really didn't start the fire.
Columbine happened under our childhood yo. And the 1980s going Postal craze was a different brand of public mass shootings. 9/11 was the SECOND attack on the Twin towers after all.
I know every event you listed, including the implied first attack on the twin towers. I was born in 93. I used to read forums and remember chat rooms during the early modern internet.
Your experience was simply not like mine, did you download the old doom shareware wads? They were hosted by id, online, before I was even able to use a computer. Diablo? Downloadable updates! Anyone remember that?
Ummm... no. I loaded it through a floppy found in the mail through a system called shareware. (Where people would leave floppy disks in people's mailboxes, and we didn't know what viruses were so we just plugged them into our computers).
Did you actually exist in the 90s? That was floppy era of shareware, you'd spread games like Doom by mail and/or by copying the floppy and giving it to a friend. That's why it was called SHAREware, you shared it with friends. In some cases, computer stores would combine a bunch of shareware games into CD-ROMs (650MBs!!! So much space!!) and you'd get a lot of shareware all at once.
Oh my goodness, it's almost like what I said had nothing to do woth floppy disks or even discrediting their use.
According to the US census, 18 percent of housholds had internet use at home. Yahoo was around in 1995, usenet usage started dropping, and school systems started getting schoolwide internet access.
Your memory is vapid and you are clearly misremembering large swaths of important facts.
Looks like 22% had internet at home, but over 54% had a computer.
How do you think the majority of computer users played Castle of the Winds, Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, or other shareware games? Hint: it wasn't the internet because most computer users didn't have internet.
1993, the previous census figures are even worse as that's before AOL
Btw, downloads weren't a thing even for those who had internet. Back then, you paid per minute hour of internet usage.
My family connected to the internet to download (POP3) out email and then disconnected. Because my Mom would then want to use the phone to call her friends. Unless you had two phone lines like a rich person, extended multi-hour download sessions at 33kbps (or slower) was just not a thing.
That's 14MB per hour, if you don't remember how slow 90s internet was.
The college students with T1 connections were the source of shareware / disks by the later 90s (like 97, 98 etc. Etc). But home users weren't doing online downloads yet, too expensive and too slow.
In a letter sent to the service's members Oct. 28, AOL Chairman Steve Case touted a new pricing plan that offers unlimited access to the service's proprietary content as well as to the Internet for $19.95 a month.
[Snip]
Until the new unlimited plan was unveiled, all users paid $9.95 a month for 5 hours of usage and $2.95 for each additional hour.
This is what I remembered. My dad always told me to watch the Internet usage, because it cost money for each hour. These were 5-hours / month plans back then. That being said, 1996 is a year before Diablo, meaning the "unlimited" plans came in soon afterwards. But "unlimited" didn't really work out in our favor because my mom and grandma who lived with us always wanted to use the phone.
And we were the only kids of the neighborhood who had internet. People came over to our house to surf the net.
First of all, I think this is you being an older millennial, my formative millennial memories, especially politically, mostly happened in the 2000s.
I think what you don't even realize your comment shows is that most of these events, while they seem like paradigm-shifting events when put into historical context and tied together with the decade of history they were surrounded by don't actually have a significant impact on the individual.
I was aware as a millennial growing up of many events like these that happened in my life. followed the news in and out. But now I couldn't even tell you much if any of the significant details of any of them.
I noticed you didn't include 9/11 as a forgotten event, an event that was truly significant in a way. Much in the same way, I'm sure most of gen z will be aware of those same types of events when they get older but will only really remember COVID, maybe something about Trump too.
Go look at this "90s was full of hope" crap that the rest of this thread is full of.
There were the Troubles in Ireland/Britain, there was Osama Bin Laden (1993 Bombing, 1998 Embassy Bombings). The was far-right nationalism. There was Columbine. There was Rodney King race riots. There was Desert Storm 1.0. There was Ruby Ridge and Waco. Etc. etc.
I dare say that today is possibly more peaceful than back then. We just are more informed about various disasters today than we used to be. All this "Era of Peace" crap the rest of this thread is talking about is pissing me off. It wasn't like that in the 90s at all.
I'm bringing up the Troubles because 90s-era Troubles got pretty bad, up to the Good Friday Agreement in the very late 90s. The world was always on fire, and any 90s kid talking about "The Peaceful 90s" has extremely selective memory.
Good. Now look at the rest of this thread downstream. Plenty of people talking about how "peaceful" the 90s were as if they didn't live in that era.
I stand by what I said. Millennials largely were ignorant of world events before 9/11 and the overall explosion of information the internet afforded us. Meanwhile, GenZ always lived in post 9/11 world AND always had information at their fingertips.
Nerds weren't celebrated back in the 90s. If you knew too much back then (or showed that you knew too much), people would look at you funny and bully you. Today, knowledge is more generally appreciated.
Plenty of people talking about how “peaceful” the 90s were as if they didn’t live in that era.
Well, those people are wrong. They may have felt that way, based on their own experiences and perspectives, but they can’t speak for the entire generation. None of us can.