Millennials and Gen Xers, I need your stories. I was born in 2000 (24 years old)...

Born same year and have same exact experience. We are zillenials, the TRVE lost generation

Just glad i got to experience the world before everything went to complete shit id say around 2016 or so

All you need to know, is that you are too young to remember Maia.

The Early-2000s were basically about

9/11

Frutiger Aero/Metro

Wnidows XP and Vista

"Radical Ki"

solely an online thing

Harry Potter

GameCube vs Playstation 2 vs Xbox vs (to a lesser extent) Dreamcast

McDonalds

Everything had to revolve around the "War on Terror"

SARS, Bird Flu, and Mad Cow

The 2007-2009 Economic Downturn

rich people had comcast internet, everyone else had dail-up

Idk, I've been a neet for over 20 years- I did pretty much the same thing. Food was better, everything was cheaper, and there were less niggers, faggots, and rainbow haired freakshows infesting everything. All in all it was slightly less shitty, but still sucked.

And Maia.

I was 16 when the 08 financial crisis hit. I went from a typical middle class lifestyle to being catastrophically poor. The only reason we managed to keep the house is because my parents cashed in some of their retirement (at great loss) and my grand parents kept food on the table. Watching my dad take food money from his mother in law was soul destroying. My parents never told me how bad it got but I was nearing 18 when we got back on our feet so I was old enough to know it was uncomfortably close. I had friends who lost literally everything, parents upside down on their houses and no jobs. As bad as the economy is today, it's going pretty well by those standards. If America fucks the economy again I'm going to cancel the commuter train because fuck going through that shit twice

I was in my last year of college when the recession hit the fan. From the perspective of a finance student it was actually pretty fascinating to be able to study my own degree becoming worthless in real time, but it didn't make it any easier to be condemned to a lifetime of retail horseshit. At least my mom was in a recession-proof career, so she ended up okay.

Journalists were still biased back then, just not as openly, or overtly so.
people have shit on the press for hundreds of years at this point

I was born in 78.
In the early 2000s, malls were still super healthy, with stores that interested you.
Electronics big box retail stores like Best Buy and Circuit City weren't yet glorified smartphone stores.
You could buy physical media multiple different places.
Doing shit as an adult was actually more convenient than it is now. If you needed to renew your driver's license, you just walked into the DMV whenever you wanted, versus having to make an appointment online.
There were no workplace training modules to sit through on woke bullshit or even your actual job. You were trained by another person and then left to work.
You didn't have every, fucking, service you use as an adult bugging you constantly to install their app.
You'd actually get tech support that wasn't in fucking India.
Fat women weren't yet being ramrodded into your brain as being attractive, and fat baboon asses weren't either.
Every person you met didn't have tattoos.
I don't think Visa/Mastercard debit cards yet existed so that was still a pain if you didn't want to use credit card.

less niggers

This can't be emphasized enough.

My dad was in sports car engineering, mainly r+d of which the entire arm went bankrupt the second investors stopped funding it. He was the primary earner so it was totally tits up when he lost his job. My mum was a self employed childminder but managed to move into the NHS when most of her clients dried up. Still, going from a 6 figure household income to one barely minimum wage really sucked. All I learned is that it was exploited by the rich and property was their target. My entire town got irl spammed with signs offering to instantly buy your house and rent it back to you. Fuck knows how many houses they picked up cheap but it must have worked

Born in the 1980s. My family was poor, and I remember when we'd cut back. The phrase "we're on a budget" meant that times were tough. I never went to movies, and when Toy Story came out I was the only kid in my class who didn't see it.
Computers were pretty expensive in the 1990s compared to now and even the mid 2000s. That's when I bought my first computer.
You actually kept in touch with people. My friends and I would call each other. People responded to emails too. I'd go to the library or use school computers for email. You didn't have to deal with social media, apps, and the Internet was less corporate. Today it's all the same shit with the same corporate design and feel. It sucks.

Debit cards existed but not everybody accepted them. Hell, I remember places accepted checks as payment. My second job in the mid to late 2000s had me endorse checks for our bank deposits.

I delivered pizza at a small neighborhood pizza place from 1998 until 2001 from age 18 to 21. Gas was $1.25 a gallon. I delivered in a Nissan Pulsar that we bought at a police action for $250. I think I changed the oil in it once and drove it 20,000 miles until the battery died and I had it towed away. I made enough money to afford rent and go out maybe once a week to a local restaurant with my girlfriend. We had a great local music scene and we went to a show just about every week.
I had nothing in savings and rarely more than $200 a month extra after expenses.

I rented a a room in a house from one of the owners of the restaurant for $400 a month. He would have his tech friends come over and they would connect a dozen desktop computers in the living room and have massive LAN parties and play Counterstrike. It would get so hot in the living room that they had to play with like a dozen fans going and all the windows open in the middle of winter.
My girlfriend would come over and we would go to Blockbuster and rent movies and take them back to my room and watch them while we hooked up. I owned a Nokia cellphone, but I never used it because we had extremely limited minutes on our plan.

Politics was rarely discussed by people under 30. Journalists had integrity and mostly reported things in an unbiased manner. Voters still cared about that.

lol to all of this
in 2003, 200,000+ people protested the impending Iraq War in NYC, and most of them were under 30
it was media lies about WMD that garnered popular support for the invasion of Iraq
journalism wasn't as shit as it is now, but it was not in a good state
voters were retards, just like they are now; they gave Bush 2 terms and in the 90s, elected the congress that gutted Glass-Steagall, which was a major factor that led to the 2008 economic crisis

people having a feel good nostalgia thread about how much better life used to be before democrats decided to reveal their true intentions to fuck the world up and this jew comes along all, "NO goy, it was ALWAYS political, always! Vote fa Democrats!"

Meds. Now.

Less technology was better.. it was just better.

You're a fuckin idiot

08 financial crisis hit

when i discovered you could get paid for being on the phone (telemarketer), i got a job for a mortgage broker while in college in 2003 and did that up until graduation. Buncha years later, I'm explaining my employment history to some cunt in HR who told me she also had a background in the mortgage industry. When I told her I never wanted to be a loan officer, she asked me all condescendingly- and specifically citing the years around 2003 - 2006 - why I indeed never wished to be a loan officer as they were, at that time, "making money hand over fist with the variable rates available." My response was, "let's just say I had a good idea of what would happen a few years later and wanted no part in contributing to it." What a fucking kike lol. The consequences never entered her mind for a second.

HR is almost always useless kikes

I know, I know lol

And fat negresses

Born in 1987 (UK).

I was an only-child and in truth was probably quite lonely in my early years. In about 1995 my dad brought home his old apple macintosh SE which became my first computer, and it was like a window into another world - I could quite happily entertain myself for days on that computer, drawing mostly, and honestly have never felt truly lonely in my life since.

Then in 1996 I got my first Windows PC (pictured). I know apple are the sexy designer brand now, but back in the mid-90s the apple operating system (called System 7) looked so fucking basic and so did their big grey box computers. When Windows 95 came out (which was actually in January 1996) it was like the future had arrived, and fuck I wanted it.

Sometime in summer 1997 we got the internet, which at the time was amazing. Very few people had it in their homes (even my school didn't have it) but my dad got it because he needed it for emails/work.

Back then 'the web' was a complete wild-west, millions of small websites, some of them totally wacky, some of them were people with niche knowledge just sharing it and others were communities like chat rooms where you'd just go chat to a bunch of randoms around the world who all shared your interest in computers. It was a geeks paradise really. Governments/police/corporations barely realised the internet existed, let alone cared about it.

In the early 2000s the computer to have was a black Dell dimension, and if you had the money you'd get a matching black flat screen instead of a CRT monitor - sadly we didn't have the money at that point as my fathers work had dried up and times were harder.

By about 2000 I had started occaisonally browsing porn after school - it was actually pretty basic compared to whats available now and far less niche. In many respects it was actually fairly conservative - just low resolution pics of generic slightly chubby trailer park blondes with big tits out - not that arousing (unless that's your thing).

Then around 2003 onwards the internet started to change. Companies started to get interested in it, and a lot of the cool small websites just vanished as people lost interest. Instead the internet just got taken over by big identical american mega-sites; Facebook/eBay/Amazon/Yahoo/Google/Hotmail. Then inevitably those companies lobbied governments around the world to protect their interests and they started to clamp down on the internet more.

2003-2010 was the dark age of the internet when it was basically just a bunch of shopping portals/affiliate marketing and super basic porn. Napster/BitTorret and PirateBay was probably the best part of the internet during that time period. Connection speeds then were good enough to actually download large files and the regulation wasn't quite there yet to clamp down on it - so you could download whole albums/TV series/films without needing to use complex VPNs or worry about the police knocking on your door one day.

Around 2010 the internet got a bit better as the porn 'tube' sites delivered increasingly better quality porn for free (I was an impoverished and horny student at that time). Also from about 2010 onwards you started to get more film/movie style content and of course streaming(YouTube/Netflix/Prime/Twitch etc.)

Born around same year. 2016 it all got shitty, the poster wrote. To make a track back: in 2016 I was smoking a lot of weed on a daily basis in my room at home listening to Mac Miller and A$AP Rocky. Outside a lot of construction sites working for the digital infrastructure: bus stops with live information on when my bus comes. Before smartphones, time online was spent on my desktop computer that was overclocked because I was deep into the tech/IT things, in 2010 I programmed a robot that could escape any maze with an actual exit. Got an A for it. 2008 - 2010 I spent many hours at the corner to meet my friends in the city, but I also was on teamspeak talking to strangers, sharing interesting links, discussing conspiracy about what's happening with our money/savings and that it's still insecure to invest in online currencies. I had around 2 to 3 days in the week with dates that were fixed, hang out in the park wednesday, go to dance class friday evening, saturday night we were coming for the sneak preview in our favorite cinema with the whole group.

Today it's work for paycheck, see how things get more expensive every 2 - 3 months, try over and over to save money, have to pay extra on things like health insurance every time I got some one the side. Bye bye cash money baby in my pockets. Money is something liquid that can boil to nothing.

they would connect a dozen desktop computers in the living room and have massive LAN parties and play Counterstrike. It would get so hot in the living room that they had to play with like a dozen fans going and all the windows open in the middle of winter.

Been there, done that. Was great times.

PCs were spaceheaters back then

It was great. Life was better. People were healthier. In my country there were hardly any niggers, shitskins or muslims. Today my country is full of them and it's made the place worse, too many people, house and rent prices extortionate, wages have stagnated due to cheap imported labour. Social media has brain-rotted people especially children. Everything is fucking woke. the governments don't listen to the people and bring in more and more draconian legislation like hate speech to control you in real life and online.

It's fucked. I want to go back, Anon Babble. I want to go back.

You must be 18 to post here.
It was great, grew up in small town middle America, we would go to the creek and play, no niggers in sight, skateboard all the time, annual trip to Showbiz Pizza for Halloween, watching WWF before it went to shit in the 90s, eating at Dairy Queen after a baseball game, drive in theaters kicked ass. I played at the playground then fell asleep while the movie was on, swimming at the swimming pool and getting the town cop to chase us around town at night then locking him up in the park because of the gates. Glorious times

I remember radio shack selling a black compaq presario for 3k+. It had a crt

I talk about the logfag positively behind its back...
Perhaps logfag's spam is easily spotted and never to my taste. But there is some comfort I take from it, knowing a paid spam thread might have been knocked off the catalogue.
More logspam. Another 200 log threads to Anon Babble.

born in 1990

remember childhood before and after internet

climbing trees, foot/bicycle races, toy swords, making shitty comics which I might find naive and charming now if I still had them.

boredom was torture, finding stuff to do was a chore but would pay off

spend half my time at friends' houses

get PC

8 jillion mods for half-life

30 year olds make me a moderator in their servers

banned for power tripping everytime

hardly ever leave my room unless it was to play games at a friend's house

grades don't slip because I was a terrible student before I had internet as well

I still sensed romance and hope in the world

my gnossis of the world still gave me ease

Maybe I am just old and this happens to everyone, but it was better before.

Oh boy, here I go ranting again!

Born late 80's in Eastern Europe.

Country ceased to exist a year later.

Piss poor by western standards.

Parents were misers. But dad was a nerd, so at least we got computer early.

Shit old games he got off old farts at his work. Literally playing 15 year old DOS games on his shiny new Pentium II. Bitch what?

CD burners were expensive as fuck. You had to know someone, who knows someone, who would let you use theirs. Or you had to pay someone.

Games were borrowed. If you didn't know the person, usually at collateral 1:1 for another game.

People literally went outside to school to hang out spots, to see who's around. Zero pre-arrangements to meet, unless you talked the day before, or earlier that day at school.

You rang people's doorbells, to see if they were at home.

Got first cellphone in 2001, and only the equivalent of ~$20 in credit. Topped off once a year on Christmas OR Birthdays.

Sending SMS or calling was too expensive. Instead, you just rang people and hang-up immediately, before they pick up, when you wanted to notify them of something.

> A ring at 4 p.m. from your buddy means he's standing outside and doesn't want to ring the house bell, because your mom is raging bitch. Etc.

Part 1/?

Cont.

90's and early 00's were peak liberty. After shedding communist totalitarian regime, people exercised their liberties with gusto.

Till '95 was Wild East. But I don't remember jack from then.

Till '00 was hungover from Wild East

Till '05, after there was no WWII, was peak optimism & prosperity.

You have no idea how free the Eastern Europe actually was back then. In some ways, it's still freer that Burgerstan and rest of the West.

Then in '08 Wall Street turned off jobs. Rest of '08 was anguish for everyone else, except for me who shipped off to college and lived off of parent's savings.

> Yay for living in culture which actually brainwashed my parents into thinking that me finding a job was shameful, and I'm supposed to focus on study. So no "fries with that" for me.

Being raised miser, like my parents, I managed to not spend much and party through the peak crisis years of 08-09.

Part 2/?

Cont.

The only source of video entertainment was TV.

VCR was a sorcery nobody knew how to use properly.

Being allowed to record was privilege.

If you wanted to tape something, so you could re-watch it again, you had to physically be there to start and stop the recording during ad breaks. And you only got one shot at it.

You lived your life around TV program schedule.

Learning that the fucking VCR had timed recording mode 8 years after we got it, was like discovering holy grail of entertainment.

Was finally able to watch TV shows that aired while I was at school.

Fucking lived Star Gate SG-1 from that point on.

Didn't get a dedicated DVD player till something like 2010, because the 15 year old VCR is still "good enough" and you can play DVDs on computer.

Part 3/?

Exposure to internet before 2000 amounted to downloading Pokemon pictures at school.

Nobody knew shit about Internet. And those who did know something about it where treating it as arcane knowledge, only available in exchange for something valuable.

So knowledge about Internet was spread by word of mouth between friends. Didn't have many friends. So knew dogshit about Internet and how cool it actually is till ~2004.

My first IT teacher was a literal Commie Macintosh user. I know, the irony. Her knowledge of PCs and Internet was absolute dogshit.

Probably the only piece of knowledge I got from her was how to use F5 refresh, and what web chat is. This was before ICQ.

Virtually never used dial-up at home, because it was too expensive. So that was either a special treat, or for things needed for school.

Got somewhat unrestricted access to Internet at school ~2004 and eventually learned how to research. Praised be Google.

Almost entirely self-taught myself everything since then.

Got first broadband in ~2005 and really delved deep into Internet.

Discovered Warez scene and caught up on decade worth of missed games, TV and movies.

>> It was fucking glorious two years.

Unfettered access to English entertainment is the reason I'm talking to you in English right.

Finally managed to see all of Buffy. Because the TV fuckers stopped airing it before I found the VCR had the time record function.

Feel bad I missed the peak Half Life mod scene.

Moved out and found Anon Babble in 2008 from a goddamn pedobear motivational poster meme. It went downhill from there.

Discovered the nerd / hacker / phreaker / BBS / edgelord subcultures and read-up on what felt like history I've missed and never got the chance to live.

Became terminally online.

The guy who nobody wanted to tell shit about Internet became the person to go to to ask for stuff. Oh how the turntables.

Any questions?

I was a young adult only by 2008 because I was born in 1990, and I don't think the world was necessary better but at least the internet wasn't completely controlled by dogshit that's specifically engineered to hook normies.

The difference was, that after a movie has been released in the theaters you could usually watch it on TV around the same time the VHS was released. Like that the blockbuster was still a topic and got ratings in the magazines PLUS you knew you will be able to watch it soon if you had a TV at home. Probably not the best idea to tell here, but my unc had more that 300VHS casettes with blockbuster movies he recorded when they were on TV. Probably 100% illegal, because he did copies from his collection, so I could get 3 movies on one VHS to watch on the weekend at home when my parents wasn't there.
Captcha: VXG0Y

I still avoid hacker stuff, more now than in the 00s. It seems too high stakes now. But when I was a teenager I really thought hackers would save the world hahaha. Does anyone still have ideas like that?

West maybe.

Eastern Europistan TV got big movies years after release, and only very occasionally.

First VHS rental place was a godsend. But money was short, so I had to pick and choose what to rent for a day, and return next day. That was a treat enjoyed couple times a year. Completely forgot about that part.

IIRC, they actually moved to DVDs and phased out VHS, before my parents got DVD player. Then warez happened, and I've evolved past the need for rentals.

It's... complicated.

Hacker used to mean someone who does interesting stuff with tech. Not necessarily illegal. The term got corrupted by news and Hollywood, so the communities abandoned it. Most people prefer to call themselves "maker", if they're into physical stuff, or just developer, if they're into software. That being said, there are people still genuinely fighting for the hacker word to be reclaimed.

So, to answer your question, the legit part of "hackerdom" has turned into "maker" and Open Source communities. There are now hacker "Capture the Flag" events done as e-sport. And there is security oriented Hackercon event. You can find recordings of talks on YouTube.

As for saving the world, I'd say that was a mix of anarchy inherent to the subculture and early Internet idealism. The anarchy part stayed, but the idealism is long gone.

And everything illegal moved to TOR. And most of stuff on TOR is illegal or political activism in foreign lands where governments have ruthless control over the web.

TV was better. You paid one bill, and had everything in one service package. Now it's 50 individual subscriptions for every streaming service. Gas prices. I remember when gas hit 2 dollars a gallon and everyone flipped their shit. You could even go to a restaurant once and awhile without having to take out a 2nd mortgage.

The term got corrupted by news and Hollywood, so the communities abandoned it.

Hackers with Angelina Jolie as a young adult is a good movie tho. Actually Malware/Spyware to read out passwords and bankaccounts were the dangers in this so called digital anarchy of warez and free information, but mostly dumb people fell for it. For example: Enter your bank account here to see her nude. *Enters bank account number* Click *Soon you will lose more than 4k from your savings* But I saw her naked LOL. That's probably the same like phishing eMails. A "hacker" isn't someone that breaks into your sys but someone that hacks your connection to read out everything you type into that screen, by knowing what programs you use, their security standards, he could translate the data into unmasked information. Like when millions of sony's user information got leaked some decade ago.

it was harder to spend all day watching porn on 56K so i spent all day playing video games instead

Gen X / Xennial '81 spec - I grew up in the world that was pre-internet, having grown up through the internet revolution I have 1st hand experience of how it was before and how different things are now because of it. Access to information and media is incredible compared to how it was in the pre-internet age where limited linear TV (4 channels here in the UK) & Radio (limited FM and MW) services and physical media, were the only way to access TV series, movies, music, accessing information exclusively through printed media. Communications have also improved beyond imagination, the idea of video calling someone from a device that fits in the palm of your hand was pure science fiction and to think you can do this to anywhere on the planet for no charge beyond the data you use is remarkable.

As for the 2000s, they started off as a continuation of 1999, things stayed on this path until 11th September 2001, that put a full stop on the 90s and the 21st century had truly arrived!

Before someone says it's wrong what I wrote: Of course the hacker get's access to your steam, bank, login for the porn site you pay fo, but that's because he collected all this data over time and now he will eventually destroy your life.