I was the guy that used audacity to make ringtones and then share them with as many people as possible. This was of course once phones could play actual music as ringtones.
Blast from the past moment. Took me 4 episodes of yugioh to be able to properly record the intro song so I could listen to it whenever I wanted. Took me 3 for Pokémon.
I used to be able to play a song or yt video and use an aux cable to go from the pc's headphone out, right back into the pc's mic in, which audacity recognized as a mic, so you could easily record anything playing in original quality.
And before 99% of the calls and texts you receive were spam, political campaigns inevitably addressing you by the wrong name with heartfelt pleas for money, IRS scams, "Bob" from Microsoft technical support, Your Car's Extended Warranty, AI generated robocalls telling you not to vote, or someone's hysterical babymomma who refuses to understand that whoever she's looking for might have had this number in 2007, but they don't have it anymore.
Man, OPs caption unlocked a core memory I have of calling my high school boyfriend at 858 pm, and talking on the phone with him for about 2.5 hours before he got notified that he was under 10 mins left for the month.
We had thought he was only going to lose 2 of his minutes 😭.
I stayed with Sprint through years of them being the shittiest in my area because I was grandfathered into an old plan with free nights starting at 5pm. Just taking non-stop at 6pm like a baller.
I think their only recourse was that there was the asterisk with the subscription verbage in really tiny fine print that was only visible if you had an 80" projector TV
Don't forget ringback tones so u could force anyone who called to listen to a scratchy version of a shitty song any time they called. My sister still had hers til like 2015 or something.
I used to buy the songs that would play as my phone ringing. Like I'm not sure how to say it but when you called me you were forced to listen to a shitty song I liked instead of hearing the riiing riiing. Or when I called my weed guy instead of hearing the riiing or was 36 Mafia "where is the bud, where is the bud playing.
Or you just lay in bed at night and just try to properly edit the score notation to a song you really like, but it's kinda niche, still all your friends know it, and then brag about it when you meet up "yo, check out my ringtone 😏" 😂.
After being pointed out that I basically nailed the window for just millennials, I realize this comment is really fucking stupid. So if you wanna waste your time.......
I think that's a good name for kids born between 1980 and 1995. We mostly grew up with NO Internet at all but were pretty immersed in it by the end of high school. I'm young enough to have had both floppy disks and flash drives in my youth. Once my classmates and I got flash drives, that's how we shared music between each other after we got Chris to download what we wanted from Limewire lol
Xennial refers to people born from somewhere in the mid 70s to 1980. It's a narrow subset of Gen X made up of those that were growing up during the information revolution.
I would say it might apply to someone in the very early 80s. But anyone born in 1995 definitely had their formative years with internet access and are firmly millennials.
To me, the earliest Millennials were the class of 2000. It always felt like there was extra pressure on us because we were going to be the first of a new millennium.
The divide was especially stark in my high school. The class of 99 - the last of Gen X - were kicked out of every pep rally and assembly for being disruptive, while the other classes were all well behaved and didn't really understand why they were acting this way.
My ringtone has been the same one for the last 15 years, Cowbell Rock. I paid for it twice, once when Ringtone Feeder was a thing, and then again from iTunes. Worth it. Best ringtone ever. Would buy again if I could.
I just go with a telephone ringing. I always have. Why not have my phone make the same sound phones made for over a century? Nothing wrong with it as-is.
I remember finding a website with fairly rough versions of popular melodies were transcribed for Nokia ringtone format. Pretty sure I went for some Metallica. Not sure if it was before or after we got ISDN, but I'm fairly sure I already had a hotmail address.
Anyone remember paying ten cents or honestly usually more per text until someone did out the numbers and we all realized we were paying more to text than NASA pays to beam data back from the goddamn Hubble? Like 5x as much on average? And only then did unlimited texting become common?
Best part was that SMS was specifically designed to use the current infrastructure at the time without inducing any real demand on it. It didn't cost the companies much of anything to implement it.
To be fair, also born at the right time to have a mobile phone as a convenience that allowed you to stay in touch as you went places. As opposed to a smartphone, aka voluntary shackle that keeps you indoors doom scrolling social media.