Divide between old and young aspies

Post Reply New Topic

I was recently thinking about this. It seems there's a pretty big generation gap between older aspies (Gen X and older) and young aspies (born after mid-1980s). Aspergers as a diagnosis didn't exist until 1994, and doctors didn't really start "seeing" autism until about 1988. That means that aspies born in the 1970s largely went undiagnosed and untreated until autism started making headlines around 2000. We grew up with ourselves and others wondering what was wrong with us. We were called lazy, defiant, and generally considered behavior problems. We had a hard time getting dates because we couldn't just google a date up on the internet.

We were far more isolated than the aspies who came after. They knew from the time that they were little that they were NOT lazy and worthless, but neurologically different. They grew up with the internet, and today's teen aspies have iphones in their pockets and have to worry about teachers hunting down kids with personal computers in their pockets. When I was in HS, the big thing was the toll free pager. This was only the early 90s! We didn't have ANY kind of cell phone, much less an iphone. Our first exposure to cell phones was in The X Files, which started running around 1992 and where Mulder and Scully carried clunky analog cell phones. Mulder certainly couldn't surf the internet on his analog cell phone!

I first logged on to the internet in 1995, when I was 20. I was a pioneer! I had a Macintosh Performa 200 with a black and white screen that only transmitted at 9600 bps over phone lines, and you had to buy an external hardware modem to do that. The internet was all TEXT for me for the first few months! Then it was slow to load images that didn't come out right on the screen. My Mac simply couldn't handle changing ads, written in a distant ancestor to Adobe Flash. Discussion groups consisted of USENET, which again was text. Email was text. The only thing that had images was the Web, and it was clunky. I had to dial in to a modem bank, and disconnect to use my land line. No cell phone for me for many years. See where the generation gap comes in? Kids today have computers in their pockets that are zillions of times more powerful than my initial Mac, which had a 16 Mhz chip and a BIG 80 MB of hard drive space. Any thoughts from the dino-aspies? (Or from the young ones?)

Bunch of whiny whippersnappers ! !

Back in my day, I was STUPID ! ! No diagnosis... Nope, my teachers told me to stop acting stupid. The other kids said I was weird. I didn't get the protection of saying, 'oh well, I have AS you know.'

There is an episode of The Andy Griffith Show in which a wealthy motorist is stranded in Mayberry and Andy and Goober both marvel over the fact that he has a phone in his car (I was in elementary School). Back then it would have been pretty much a walkie-talkie with a receiver on it, but even though they may have existed among the ultra-rich, a mobile phone was virtually Science Fiction in those days, as was the concept of computers.

I knew NASA used computers for determining orbits and trajectories for spacecraft, but a computer at your fingertips that you could just log onto and access a nearly unlimited databank of information whenever you wanted was one of those crazy Star Trek ideas (hell, color television was cutting edge at the time). Even the clunky computers some high-tech dating services used to match up blind daters on twenty to fifty compatibility points took up entire rooms and had to be operated by cards with holes punched in them. The big floppy disc was undreamt of, much less Cds or flash drives. Drives were what you pulled your car into the garage on, or something golfers did.

In my early teens, I saw my first computerized video game in an amusement park. It was called PONG, and that's exactly what it did - allowed you to play Ping-Pong with tiny white paddles and a small square 'ball' on a black and white screen. Very, very slowly.

Videotape was in use in television stations, but the home Betamax and VHS cassettes wouldn't come along until I was in my twenties. Betamax, you remember those, right? That was when Sony invented home videotape and wouldn't share the technology with its competitors, so the competitors all got together and invented their own format and drove Sony's Betamax completely out of the marketplace. Good times.

About the time I turned thirty, one of my friends built a desktop computer from a kit he got at Radio Shack. About all you could do with it was play chess and solitaire. I didn't see much future in it. Then I overheard my Mom say she was using computers at her employment agency to store file information and that they made great replacements for the typewriter, but it still didn't strike me as any big deal - newfangled office equipment, who cares?

I took a job as an advertising copywriter and started using an IBM 286 (I think) as a word processor. Black screen, orange characters, and I had to go through and delete old data at least once a month, or the hard drive would fill up. Out in the sales offices, the management had new 486 models and they had several useful features and spectacularly colorful psychedelic screen savers. Okay, I had to get me one of those. I might actually get around to doing some serious writing if I had a machine like that at home. Some of the salespeople are now using car phones for real, but they're still huge - these actually look more like walkie-talkies than telephones, and you not only can't put 'em in your pocket, they're hardwired into the car.

Some of the guys at work told me about AOL, where you could hook your computer up to a phone line and communicate with other computer users all over North America, so I had to try that next, that and dial up bulletin boards. My daughter's just been born at this point (I started parenthood a little late). Coming home from work one day, a reporter on NPR is talking about something called the Internet that's been around for ages among the military and academic establishment, but Uncle Sam is just now allowing access to it to civilians. My computer building friend is now working at a computer store and hooks me up. After several months I notice web pages are getting more and more complex - now a lot of them have animated pictures and video on them and it takes longer and longer for my machine to load them. Time to upgrade. Hey, look - mobile phones are actually mobile now, you can carry them around and even fit one in your pocket, so you can talk anywhere - just don't forget to extend the antenna.

Since then, the changes are frickin' nonstop. Just about the time I get used to something and feel competent with it, there's a new version, or a whole new technology to replace it. Oh, I forgot to mention how I collected thousands of vinyl record albums over those years, then another several thousand Cds, often replacing stuff I'd already bought in the more primitive format, years before. Now both the vinyl and the Cds sit virtually untouched and gathering dust while I surf the Net, looking for cover art for all the MP3s I've collected. Not to mention the hundreds of VHS movies that gave way to DvDs that I'm now replacing with Blu Rays. Will somebody stop this train, please? I'm too old for this sh*t.

Old Charlie stole the handle
And the train, it won't stop going--
No way to slow down.

Edit: Have that only on vinyl (MFSL pressing) since the CD sounded like a boxful of hissing cats.

stop the world! i want to get off.
anyways, most MP3s sound like dessicated versions of the uncompressed music stored on CD, so it seems sad to me that you don't listen to your CDs more.

I'm glad my son wont have to go through the same crap that I did.
My diagnosis was "weird".
With the internet and places like Wrong Planet, hopefully my son will not feel so alone.

I agree with the sound quality but I use my MP3s/rips more often because I hate changing CDs, and when you have a couple hundred to go through that you like to listen to, then yeah, its simply more efficient to make an MP3 playlist. And yeah I got for efficiency.


To some I may be on the young side, but I feel there is a difference if you were through what I was. I didnt even get my diagnosis of AS until 5th-6th grade, which was 1998-1999... somewhere in there. That was also around the time my family got its first computer, and also around the time the school I was in first got computers. Video games however, ive been around since I was 3-4 :/. But yeah, id change the 1994 number for aspergers to 1998-1999, because from my experiences that was when the diagnosing of it really started IMO. And yeah before that I was regarded as just a misbehaving brat and stuff, just like the older ones on here. so really I can find some common points.

Same here. The elementary school ordered me to go to a therapist (who was a very nice lady, but utterly clueless about what was "wrong") and then decided my mom was the problem because she refused to let them walk all over me. They tried to physically ban her from coming to the school. She said "You and what army?!?"

I'm 31, and since I had my mom's support that makes me more fortunate than many of the others here, but yeah, no one had even heard of AS when my problems were the worst. I was in high school in 1994 and had learned how to adapt fairly well by then (read: blend into the woodwork for the most part).

If the diagnosis had existed when I was in grade school I probably would have been tested and diagnosed with AS early on.

Good read here!

I think there might have been some benefits for those of us not saddled with the label so early. I think my struggle to, well... exist, means something. It's taken me to places I wouldn't have gone to if I'd known at 10 years old that I had a neuro disorder. Some bad ones though, for sure. It's been challenging, and still is.

i happened to be good at taking tests, which was fortunate, because i was a very strange kid.

one thing i've come to remember is that i would spend my whole lunch hour (in some grade in elementary school--before i figured out this drew too much attention to myself) pacing in complicated symmetrical patterns on the blacktop. i think i was adding more designs each lap...

when i was in 4th grade, i had a teacher who liked to it kids with a ruler. although she never hit me, one time this so upset me that i went to the principal's office to report her. the teacher, so far as i ever knew, was not criticized, but they had me go through a whole armory of psychological tests (ca. 1968 style), including the famous ink-blot.

it gave me secret satisfaction to provide them with the exact answer i decided would make me seem perfectly "normal"... although in retrospect, i realize i was also unaccountably terrified of being institutionalized. i guess i knew i wasn't like anyone else there.

this made me a model student through high school.

m.

... and then there are those of us born in the '50s. Our parents had "nervous breakdowns" and we got sent to principals' offices for paddlings or even off-and-away to various military or parochial schools or "homes for unwed mothers" if we acted out or up too much. And of course, our phone numbers had only 5 digits on party lines and our B/W TV screens had round corners. However, we did have Erector Sets and cap guns with plastic bullets and science labs in boxes long before Leggos ever came around.

To a large extent, I've stayed off the technology train. I don't find that it's been that much of an advance, to be honest.

When the Apple Mac first came out, I was in art school. The excitement over this little machine that had very limited capabilities was way overblown. Artists who until that point had been fastidious about every nuance of a visual image were ready to accept scratchy printouts that would never have passed muster as drawings, or images relegated to a flickering screen. To this day an image created on a computer does not come close to besting a pencil drawing by a skilled hand. There is still this overblown excitement over what computers can do, that is wholly unjustified.

People have already mentioned how much worse music sounds on a computer, It also applies to movies made on a computer. Pixar movies don't hold a candle to hand-drawn Disney movies from the 50s. Their figures have no substance, and they have awkward and slightly disturbing facial expressions.

I think computers have their place of course. They are great for word processing and storing information. They are pretty good for communicating, though again they are less good at it than old fashioned human contact. Personally, I have only run into trouble trying to connect with people on the internet. I like websites like WP, of course, and I have learned a lot from the people here, but it's like an island in the morass that is the internet.

Because I am poor and not because I am anti-technology necessarily, I have never had a cell phone, I don't have a laptop, I don't have a DVD player (my computer is a bottom-of-the-line model from 2002 and does not have a DVD drive), I don't have an iPod or any portable music player, but I don't miss any of these things. Everything they can do can be accomplished with an older technology. I'm not sure the technology we have today is all that revolutionary.

I was lucky. My dad, an undiagnosed aspie to this day, worked in the aerospace industry and changed jobs - and cities - often. Thus I changed schools before anyone's records caught up with me. By the age of 16, in South Australia, I'd finished with school and been admitted to a university. Then I left home, left study, left everything. Lucky, alright.

For my fiftieth birthday, I earned myself a degree; for my fifty-second an aspergers diagnosis. Nowadays I just wonder what might have been different if I hadn't lost the forty years in between.

1994 was the year of publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Revision (DSM-IV), the Bible of psychiatry, at least in America. DSM-IV was the first version to include AS as a diagnosis; prior to that, in the US, it was not possible to be diagnosed with AS because the diagnosis did not exist. It's still percolating into the field, some 16 years later - it should become widely known just about the time the DSM-V comes out and changes things again.

In 1989, an Air Force psychiatrist diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder, because he thought my "flatness of affect" meant that I was just faking emotions. It simply did not occur to him that someone could be communicative, yet still autistic - that wasn't even a thing then. Autistics were all like "Rain Man" (a character based on someone who isn't even autistic, but we'll let that slide), or like my sister, who at the time spoke mostly in commercial catch-phrases. We were just "lazy", "stupid", or "crazy".

I'm not sure it's possible to truly communicate to some of our younger members what that was like, any more than I've been able to get a lot of younger folks to realize just how recently racial discrimination was actually enshrined in law (for instance, Loving v. Virginia, which threw out enforcement of existing laws against interracial marriage, happened in 1967, just 43 years ago; the last state to actually remove the laws from their books, South Carolina, finally got around to doing so in 2000). They're used to a different world; it's just "the way things have always been."

Do you feel that those years are "lost" because you didn't have a diagnosis? I'm 46 and was only diagnosed this year, but I can't see that being diagnosed is any help. If anything, I am less hopeful that I can connect with people because I now know why it's been so difficult in the past, when I might have had some hopefulness still. Now I understand better why I had meltdowns and ran into serious conflicts with groups, but I have no strategy for avoiding those setbacks other than just avoidance: staying home by myself.

I can relate somewhat to your experiences because I too moved often as a kid, not just to different cities but to different continents where I had to learn whole new languages. Perhaps if that hadn't been so hard I would have been better able to learn to talk to people, who knows.

I never did leave home or school, but I haven't had a professional job ever, and no job at all for years now.

I sympathize with what you've been through.

Yeah I know 1994 was the date it was officially in the DSM, i just pointed out based on my observations that 1998/1998 was really when the diagnosis started to get taken seriously.

Hell, even before my official diagnosis, I got bounced between so many different diagnosis' that it would make people heads spin. to list a few... ADD, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder, PDD-NOS, Schizophrenia (and had to go through a shedload of tests to prove I didn't have it, but I was really close to getting the diagnosis at one point), that and during the elementary school phase Ive was also constantly referred as "Severely Emotionally Disturbed".

And now Im going through the hell of making a disability appeal because I cant even get any sort of assistance through the gov offices, and based on observation and state doctor remarks, I didnt get put back on disability purely because of the fact that I don't have a"physical" condition.

Cant even get hired and college apps still got screwed up, this time because they decided to lose all my info, and even my sister is having issues with financial aid and s**t, they never contact her back and s**t. So yeah I am EXTREMELY WARY of post-secondary education because of my own and others experiences, plus the fact ive been getting into violent meltdowns more and more frequently again, so no need to expose myself to society because of it.