50 Fun Facts About Generation Gap

Which storage medium, first made by IBM in 1971, is pictured on the save icon in many computer programs?

The floppy disk became so familiar that software kept its outline as the save button long after the drives disappeared. The most popular 3.5-inch version held just 1.44 MB.

Which typewriter-era office duplicate is the usual explanation for the cc at the top of an email?

Carbon copy was the name for a duplicate typed through a sheet of carbon paper. Business letters listed the extra recipients after the letters cc, and email simply kept the label.

Which singer's 1985 song Running Up That Hill topped the UK chart in 2022 after featuring in Stranger Things?

Kate Bush reached number one 37 years after releasing the song, which had stalled at number three in 1985. It was only her second UK chart-topper, after Wuthering Heights in 1978.

Which video rental chain, with over 9,000 stores at its 2004 peak, turned down a chance to buy Netflix in 2000?

Blockbuster could have had the young DVD-by-mail company for $50 million. Ten years later the chain filed for bankruptcy protection, beaten by mail-order discs and video on demand.

Which band's 1977 hit Dreams returned to the charts in 2020 after a skateboarder's viral TikTok video?

Fleetwood Mac owed the revival to Nathan Apodaca, an Idaho man who filmed himself skating to work with a bottle of juice after his truck broke down. The clip sent the song to the top of a Billboard rock chart.

Which rapper's 2000 song about an obsessive fan gave younger generations the slang word stan?

Eminem named the song after its letter-writing character, and the name turned into shorthand for any devoted fan. The Oxford English Dictionary added the word in 2017.

Which classroom computer game of the 1980s is notorious for killing off wagon parties with dysentery?

The Oregon Trail began in 1971, when a student teacher in Minnesota wrote it with two fellow students for his eighth grade history class. The first version ran on a teleprinter with no screen.

Which website's first upload, in April 2005, was a 19-second clip of a co-founder at the San Diego Zoo?

YouTube opened with co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants and remarking on their trunks. Google bought the site the following year for $1.65 billion.

Which Greek letter, chosen by Australian researcher Mark McCrindle, names the cohort that directly follows Generation Z?

Alpha was the natural next step, McCrindle explained, because scientific naming switches to the Greek alphabet when the Latin one runs out. Generation Alpha is the first cohort born entirely in the 21st century.

Which 1969 music festival drew more than 400,000 people to Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York?

Woodstock took place about 60 miles from the town it is named after. Its organisers lost their planned site in Wallkill weeks before the festival and had to find a new one.

Which morning talk show host fronted Generation Gap, the ABC game show spun off from a Jimmy Kimmel Live segment?

Kelly Ripa quizzed pairs of relatives, usually a grandparent and a grandchild, on pop culture from each other's eras. Jimmy Kimmel served as one of the executive producers.

Which label for people born from 1928 to 1945 did Time magazine apply to young adults in a 1951 article?

Silent Generation was the label Time reported in a piece titled The Younger Generation. The magazine was describing people born from 1923 to 1933, and the name later migrated to a slightly younger group.

Which NBC Nightly News anchor named Americans who lived through the Depression and World War II the Greatest Generation?

Tom Brokaw made the phrase the title of his 1998 book of profiles, which grew out of his trip to the 40th anniversary commemorations of D-Day.

Which Canadian writer's 1991 debut novel made Generation X the standard label for people born after the baby boom?

Douglas Coupland popularised the word McJob in the same book. He had trained as a sculptor and found unexpected success as a novelist.

In which country's parliament did MP Chlöe Swarbrick silence a heckler in 2019 with the two-word retort OK boomer?

New Zealand's parliament heard the retort during a speech backing a climate change bill, and the exchange spread quickly on social media. The heckler, Todd Muller, actually belonged to Generation X.

Which English band's 1965 youth anthem My Generation features Roger Daltrey singing with a deliberate stutter?

The Who recorded it for a debut album of the same name. By one account, Daltrey was advised to stutter so that he would sound like a British mod on amphetamines.

Which nickname for Generation Z took off in 2018 through an internet meme mocking its teenagers?

Zoomers joins the shorthand boomer to the Z of Generation Z. Before the meme, the word was occasionally used for particularly active baby boomers.

Which American writer in Paris did Ernest Hemingway credit with coining Lost Generation for survivors of World War I?

Gertrude Stein, in Hemingway's telling, heard it from a French garage owner scolding a young mechanic who was slow to repair her car. Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises.

Which author of On the Road introduced the phrase Beat Generation in 1948 for an underground youth movement in New York?

Jack Kerouac gave the movement its name. Ten years later a San Francisco columnist coined beatnik by blending Beat with Sputnik, the Soviet satellite launched the previous autumn.

Which telephone part, replaced by push-button keypads from the 1960s, was turned with a fingertip for every digit?

The rotary dial sent each digit down the line as a matching number of electrical pulses while the wheel spun back. Push-button phones were first shown to the public at the 1962 World's Fair.

Which CBS variety programme drew over 73 million viewers when the Beatles performed on it in February 1964?

The Ed Sullivan Show set a US television audience record that night, in a broadcast seen as the start of the British Invasion. The record stood for three years, until the final episode of The Fugitive.

Which music cartridge, offered by Ford as an option on the 1966 Mustang, played songs on one endless loop of tape?

8-track cartridges could not be rewound because of the loop, so a listener could only play, fast forward or jump to the next program. The format came from a group led by Bill Lear of Lear Jet.

Which hand-operated calculating tool did engineers rely on before the HP-35 pocket calculator arrived in 1972?

The slide rule was developed in the 17th century from John Napier's work on logarithms. Once scientific calculators became cheap in the mid-1970s, it was largely obsolete within a few years.

Which plastic toy, based on a bamboo exercise aid from Australia, sold 25 million in four months for Wham-O in 1958?

The hula hoop was named after the Hawaiian dance its users seemed to imitate. Within two years of the launch, sales had passed 100 million.

Which CBS Evening News anchor of the 1960s and 1970s was named the most trusted man in America in an opinion poll?

Walter Cronkite anchored the programme from 1962 to 1981 and was known for his long coverage of the space programme. In 1963 his broadcast became American network television's first nightly half-hour newscast.

Which encyclopaedia, first published in Edinburgh from 1768, announced the end of its printed edition in March 2012?

Britannica's last printed edition, published in 2010, filled 32 volumes and 32,640 pages. After that the encyclopaedia carried on as a digital publication.

Which 1970s CBS sitcom pitted Archie Bunker against a counterculture son-in-law he nicknamed Meathead?

All in the Family topped the yearly Nielsen ratings for five seasons in a row, the first series to do so. Producer Norman Lear based it on a British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part.

Which author of The Bonfire of the Vanities labelled the 1970s the Me Decade in a 1976 New York magazine essay?

Tom Wolfe saw Americans turning from the communal values of the 1960s towards individualism. The baby boomers later picked up a matching label of their own, the Me generation.

Which name, blending two generation labels, describes people born from about 1977 to 1983 with an analog childhood?

Xennials was coined by writer Sarah Stankorb in a 2014 magazine article. Other names suggested for the same in-between group include the Star Wars Generation.

Which label did commentator Jonathan Pontell coin for younger baby boomers born from 1954 to 1965?

Generation Jones plays on keeping up with the Joneses and on the slang jonesing, a craving, for a group whose big expectations met the souring economy of the 1970s.

Which Sony cassette player, launched in July 1979, let teenagers carry their own soundtrack on a pair of headphones?

The Walkman began as a modified Pressman, a small recorder Sony sold to journalists, shrunk into a player at the request of Masaru Ibuka. Sony aimed it squarely at the youth market.

Which cable channel went on air in August 1981 with the Buggles' video for Video Killed the Radio Star?

MTV filled its early schedule with music videos introduced by presenters known as video jockeys, or VJs. It launched at 12:01 a.m. on the first day of the month.

Which Sony videotape format, launched in 1975, lost the home video war of the 1980s to JVC's rival VHS?

Betamax had the slightly sharper picture, but its early tapes ran for only 60 minutes, too short to record a film or a big game. Sony went on selling blank cassettes until 2016.

Which 1980 arcade game has a hero whose shape is said to come from a pizza with one slice removed?

Pac-Man was designed by Toru Iwatani, who wanted an arcade hit that would appeal to women as well as men at a time when most games were about war or sports.

Which slang word for the slightly off trend, coined at Beverly Hills High School in 2013, took off on TikTok in 2021?

Cheugy was coined by student Gaby Rasson and became a put-down for the lifestyle trends of the early 2010s. Press coverage cast it as a fresh chapter in a war between Gen Z and millennials.

Which Washington state band's 1991 album Nevermind is credited with bringing grunge to a mainstream audience?

Nirvana's breakthrough is also credited with speeding the decline of hair metal and reviving punk culture for the young people of Generation X.

Which internet provider flooded 1990s mailboxes with free trial discs, at one point using half the CDs made worldwide?

AOL owed the campaign to marketing chief Jan Brandt, who set out to hand out as many trial discs as possible through unconventional partners. It was nicknamed carpet bombing.

Which 1985 John Hughes film follows five teenagers from different cliques through a Saturday in detention?

The Breakfast Club cost about $1 million to make and took in more than $52 million. Hughes had written the script in 1982 and started casting after Sixteen Candles came out.

Which file-sharing service, launched in June 1999 by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, let users swap MP3 songs for free?

Napster took its name from Fanning's high school nickname, Nappy. Copyright lawsuits forced the service to shut down in July 2001, barely two years after it began.

Which social network of the 2000s automatically made its co-founder Tom Anderson the first friend of every new member?

Myspace was bought by News Corporation for $580 million in 2005. A year later it passed Google Search to become the most visited website in the United States.

Which feared computer glitch, caused by storing years as just two digits, had firms braced for chaos on 1 January 2000?

The Y2K bug left many programs unable to tell 2000 from 1900. Forecasts put the repair bill at $400 billion to $600 billion, yet few major errors occurred when the date arrived.

Which egg-shaped digital pet from toymaker Bandai became a worldwide playground craze in 1997?

Tamagotchi roughly translates as egg watch. Owners raised the creature through its life stages with three small buttons, and a neglected pet could fall sick and die.

Which 1995 Pixar film about a jealous cowboy doll was the first feature made entirely with computer animation?

Toy Story was also the first feature film Pixar ever produced. Its director, John Lasseter, received a Special Achievement Academy Award for the breakthrough in 1996.

Which former Mickey Mouse Club cast member topped charts in over 20 countries with her 1998 debut single?

Britney Spears released ...Baby One More Time in September 1998, and Rolling Stone later named it the greatest debut single of all time.

Which video app, bought by Twitter in 2012 and shut down in 2017, limited every clip to six seconds?

Vine cost Twitter $30 million only four months after its three founders started the company. Twitter announced the end of uploads in October 2016, ahead of the final closure.

Which messaging app, first released as Picaboo by three Stanford students in 2011, made disappearing photos popular?

Snapchat grew out of Reggie Brown's idea for an app whose pictures vanished after viewing. He took it to fellow student Evan Spiegel, who had some business experience.

Which Shanghai-based lip-sync app did ByteDance buy in 2017 and merge into TikTok the following year?

Musical.ly let users make lip-sync music videos lasting from 15 seconds to a minute, with speed settings that ran from slow motion to time-lapse.

Which block-building game created by Markus Persson did Microsoft buy, along with its studio Mojang, for $2.5 billion?

Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time. Persson, known to players as Notch, wrote the original version in the Java programming language.

Which slang word for charm, popularised by streamer Kai Cenat, was named Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023?

Rizz may be a clipped form of charisma, taken from the middle of the word in the way that fridge comes from refrigerator. Cenat said he stopped using it once it went viral.

Which boy band became the first act from South Korea to top the US Billboard 200 album chart in 2018?

BTS is short for Bangtan Sonyeondan, which translates as Bulletproof Boy Scouts. The album that reached number one was Love Yourself: Tear.