Reply #6: The generation of the tail end of the baby boom [View All]

[Thor_MN]

Victim to declining school enrollments, consolidation of schools, "New Math", experiments in how children should be educated by newly minted teachers of the early baby boom generation. Our education was in a coasting, "we made it over the hump" era.

I have often felt that my generation was moving in the shadow of the babyboomers ahead of us. We were the hand-me-down kids, surviving off of whatever was left over - the real attention was always on the self absorbed generation 5 years older.

We were educated in the vacuum starting with Nixon and ending with Reagan - had to find our first real jobs during Bush I to pay off our student loans. Our younger siblings got the benefits of action finally being taken to improve schools, our older siblings got the benefits of being the focus of the peak of the baby boom. Our tuition paid for the maintenance delayed to keep costs down for the peak boomers, the attention of colleges was on rebuilding infrastructure while we were trying to get an education.

Computers were not common for most of us. I wrote my first program in 1977 using a 4 line example of BASIC code in a Radio and Electronics magazine as a starter. We used a 10 character per second teletype machine to connect via modem to a mainframe, a long distance call to the nearest college. Storage was on paper tape - holes punched in a strip of paper to encode the 7 bit binary values. There were about three of us in my class of 180 who had the slightest clue about computers. The teachers knew nothing about them, we had to teach ourselves.

Now comes our generation's turn to clean up the messes of the baby boomers. Will we be adequate to the task?