Dude I was born in the early 90s and even I assumed "Pagers" was something I am not familiar with when I read the news. The name of a city? A guy? Some ethnic group? Some new military car? At some point I thought the news outlet just meant Prague (especially since I read it in German news first). I never would have guessed they literally meant pagers. Took me like 2 news report headlines and 4 mentions on lemmy to be like "oh wait what for real?!"
Not true, I heard they're blowing up.
Born just on the cusp of Gen z, so I'm debatably a zoomer. But weren't pagers a big thing in hospitals for a long time? I certainly saw them while watching scrubs as a kid.
Still are.
Bold of you to assume the average person reads the news
Gen z here. I was not around in the 80's or 90's, but everything people describe as being from the 90's and some stuff from the 80's was just my life in the mid 2000's. I definitely know what pagers are. Like hell, we had a stack of floppy discs at home and my first computer had a floppy disc reader. I used to play duck hunt on my dad's nes and super Mario Land on my own Gameboy. That stuff doesn't just disappear at the turn of the decade.
floppy disc reader
Yeah yeah you know what i mean
2007 here, never used a pager. Honestly thought it was one of those clippy step counters at first.
I do however have a Gameboy and a stack of floppies.
I had heared about Pager in "Stein Gate" anime.
I have a banana and a microwave at home, should I do it?
El Psy Kongroo
I don’t know, as a millennial I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid. I was in fact familiar with all of those since this old stuff doesn’t just disappear and was still used around me in some capacity.
But unlike cassette tapes (that were still quite popular if you were an earlier millennial, plus Guardians of the Galaxy) slide projectors that are often shown in many movies and TV shows (and again, used in school when millennials where there) and vinyl that had made a big resurgence and is still sold today; pagers were pretty much extinct in the US by the time the first gen z kid came into existence.
Obviously, some of them will know what they are, but I'd bet like half wouldn't.
I always heard people that I don’t know cassette tapes or vinyls or slide projectors when I was a kid.
Cassettes?
Sorry... Cassettes!?
There's someone out there who is attempting to insult millennials by saying we're too young for cassettes?
What the heck else would we be listening to music on, Brenda? We didn't have discmans, sure they existed but we had kid money, and it wasn't worth it until anti-skip came along in 1997, by which point at 10-15 we already had a cassette collection... so we had walkmans!
2 billion blank cassettes were sold in 1997, 2 billion the year before... those born in 1996 didn't get born into a world where the 2 billion cassettes sold that year magically disappeared before the kid was old enough to form memories.
Cassettes were the best, though CD-R changed the game for custom mix "tapes", I never went back to actual mix tapes after we got the tech to burn cds. Mix tapes were still going around all year levels in my first year of highschool, but it was mostly mix CDs going around when I graduated, and the rich kids were already just swapping usbs. By uni, we'd send each other mediafire links to a zip file full of mp3s.
I can still kind of imagine the sensation of sticking my pinkie finger in a cassettes to rewind when I couldn't find a pen. Though weirdly, I can't remember how I used to rewind VHS's, I can't picture that feeling. I'm guessing I probably used the rewind feature for video more often, and was find hand rewinding my music.
I think the older generations are forgetting how the passage of time works. Also, just how many of us millennials grew up poor with Gen X hand me downs 😂
Well the cool kid in class had a minidisc!
I had a portable laser disc player. Lots of people thought I was a pizza delivery guy just jamming out to magic pizza tunes. It had to be held level
I got my first MiniDisc in 99, when I was 19. It was Panasonic off eBay, and it was fucked. So I got my second MiniDisc in 99 when I was 19. THAT one was a Sony, and was rock solid.
I wish I could have afforded one in ‘96, because then I might have got more use out of the tech before MP3 strutted up and pantsed it.
Born in 91, I had a walkman. Got a disc man when I was like 10, but never used it because a, it skipped like a mother fucker it I was walking, and b, cassettes were so much cheaper. I used to listen to books on tape from the library while walking around my town. My mom was a badass who replaced all our batteries with rechargeables and I would even listen to them while sleeping using the walkman instead of the stereo haha
Also, I never rewound a vhs by hand, always used the VCR or the dedicated tape rewinder shaped like a racecar haha
I see your slide projector and raise you an overhead projector.
Hell, I'm a millennial and I had a professor at college maybe five years ago who used an overhead because he refused to figure out how to use PowerPoint with the computer projector.
I see your overhead projector and raise you a zip drive and a mini disc. I blow my NES cartridge to bid adieu to you.
I bet a zip drive could blow their minds. The mini disc and nes cartridge wouldn’t even phase them. Stuff like that are too iconic.
I bet a zip drive could blow their minds.
Show the Blue Yeti streaming generation the old boom mics we had. The ones that looked like refueling probes.
It's crazy how ubiquitous those were. Anyone with a mic for their PC had that exact mic.
Back when all that existed for online voicecomms was ventrilo, i took one of those boom mics and taped it to one of the ear muffs of an analog headset meant for cd players, as I could not actually afford a mic+headset combo.
Worked for years rofl.
taped it to one of the ear muffs of an analog headset
Lol I remember my dad being so excited when he got one of these for our windows 95 PC that he had us record something for it and told us all about how advanced it was.
Spelling it this way is just a phase.
I always thought zip drives were another term for flash drives because so many people just used the terms interchangably.
Reminds me of how everyone is now misusing the term "ROM" to mean "Storage" when it actually means "Read-Only Memory". Drives me nuts every time I see it in advertising.
They are still considered essential in German schools.
vinyls
FYI it’s called a “record”, or music could be “on vinyl”. They were never referred to as “vinyls”.
Also VCRs were never called “VHS’s”
I’m an annoying millennial I call em acetates cause I figure what they were called in the 40s or thereabouts is good enough for me see. Now I’m off to my ether frolicking and ice cream social daddy o or watever.
Here in the UK they weren’t often referred to as a VCR, or even a VHS, to be honest. It was always “the video player”. Even if it was a recorder. At least that was my experience.
Alpha, maybe, but zoomers definitely not.
I wondered about this as a tactic. Like doesn't a pager really limit the age group / demographic you can target?
Not really. They're using them because they're untrackable (one way pagers only receive data and never send anything). That's quite important if your enemy has laser guided bombs and a complete lack of empathy for civilian lives.
Gen Z is a lot older than you think, early gen Z were around when fax machines were still common. Gen alpha maybe though.
people don’t still fax for work? maybe my country is old fashioned.
Fax machines are still in big use. Source, am an attorney without a fax machine and it's a major pain in the ass because all older attorneys use them.
Pagers are still widely used in the medical field, especially, for surgeons.
Wearing one right now. It’s my cue to go drive people to the hospital.
Also volunteer fire departments are big users.
I doubt it, even if they've never seen one in real life, they talk about it a lot in all medical dramas.
Gen Z, probably would know. Although most of them probably don't know what a floppy disk is
I drew a floppy disk as part of an online game of Pictionary and the youngest member of the team thought it was a Playstation 4.
Although he also tried to spell tarantula with a Q in it, so maybe there's something else going on there.
Floppy disks are too iconic, even if as Save-buttons. Now try them not knowing early ones were actually floppy!
I'm talking about myself, my 1997 ass had only heard of, and saw pictures of, the hard ones
Even as a younger millennial they were barely in my life. My mom had one when I was in elementary school for work, and other than that I just know beepers from medical shows and Dennis, the beeper king, from 30 Rock. Technology is cyclical.
Prolly not, foldables are compared to pagers or smartwatches are also compared to pagers, and grenades too!
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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.