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.