It was right there with flying cars and domed cities on the moon. That was part of the whole Disneyworld/OMNI Magazine promise about life in the year 2000.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      21 days ago

      You learned it via a computer. But a human was the one who told you the information. So that’s really not different from getting it from a book.

      • treadful@lemmy.zip
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        21 days ago

        I don’t think people in the 80s and 90s meant anything else. It’s not like AI was really on the horizon. Educational interactive CD-ROMs were where everyone’s head was at in the 90s.

    • Horsey@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Came here to say this. I am one of the oldest people you’ll ever meet that learned how to read on a computer. My parents bought me reader rabbit in the mid 90s and I played the shit out of it lol.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Mid 90s…and you think you’re among the oldest to learn reading via pc? Wouldn’t you be roughly 30ish today?

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 days ago

          1994 was 30 years ago. They’re likely to be in their mid 30s to mid 40s, depending on why they used the computer.

          In my school the kids who had trouble reading in their teens had additional lessons on the computer to help their reading, and the rest of us had occasional reading lessons on the computer when we were about ten years younger. This was the 80s and 90s in the UK

          • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            1992 was 32 years ago, but mid-90s could be anything from 1992-1997.

            Born in 92, reading text via pc by 94.

            32 is still 30ish.

            I fail to see how they would be mid 40s. I was born in 83, meaning I’m 41, so not even yet mid 40s. I was reading by the mid 80s.

            Unless you think he was 10-15 before he learned to read.

            I mean I can see the case for mid 30s, which still falls under 30ish, but mid 40s???

            • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              21 days ago

              Mid 90s is 94 to 96, not most of the decade. Most people don’t start reading as soon as they’re born, they usually wait a few years ;)

              As I already said though I knew a few people who were in their teens in the mid 90s who were using computers to learn to read. They were my age, and are in their mid 40s now.

              I can’t speak for anywhere else, but in my little corner of Wales, we didn’t have computers in junior school (the school we attended until we were 11), and there were no computers in our classrooms in the comprehensive school (11 to 15 or 18, depending on whether you did your A levels). There was a computer class, and a handful of computers in the school library. The kids who were missed by the teachers and who were found to not be able to read were given extra lessons to learn.

              I doubt that OP was in a situation like that, but it’s not overly unlikely.

        • Horsey@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          33 as of last month. My father bought a windows 95 computer and bought me a bunch of reading software. Sure there were older educational reading software, but computers weren’t mass market until the mid 90s with windows 95 as far as I’ve read.

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      Seriously. I learned way more math, history, and science from YouTube and Wikipedia than I had from 13 years in the K-12 system.