Answer: Oregon Trail Generation

Defining an entire generation, as with any era in history, is a tricky affair. In the United States, for example, people born from the early-to-mid 1960s all the way to the early 1980s have been called Generation X, the generation that followed the Baby Boomers and preceded the Millennials—a generation defined by a birth year in the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Problematically, however, there’s typically a pool of people born at the very end and beginning of these generational transitions that don’t have a lot in common with the bulk of people on both sides of the generational line. Being born in 1965 is a lot different from being born in 1980, and being born in 1980 is a lot different from being born in 1995. As a result, sociologists and researchers often try to find a defining set of characteristics within these transitional periods.

With that in mind, children born in the late 1970s and early 1980s have been called the Oregon Trail Generation. This is a direct nod to the rise of the personal computer and the ubiquity of the early computer video game Oregon Trail found on Apple II computers in thousands of school computer labs across the United States during the time they were students.

The biggest defining characteristic of the Oregon Trail Generation is their interaction with technology and a childhood that straddled the divide between an analog and digital world. Children of this era would have used analog technology like records and cassette tapes, but then experienced the rise of digital music (first with the CD and then later with actual computer-delivered content).

For most of their generation’s time frame, their adolescence also tended to align roughly with the rise of mainstream internet usage, leading the journalist Anna Garvey to refer to their experience as an “AOL Adolescence” in reference to the then-popular dial-up internet service that connected millions of the Oregon Trail Generation to the early internet.