I'm in the same boat, born on a cusp year of the two generations, and I have long felt like a surfer who is struggling to ride the crest of a wave but who knows that the crash to shore is fast approaching.
Technically being born in 78 makes you GenX. Yet if you have a brother born only 4 years later, it's another generation? We had the exact same experience, Atari 2600 on a TV that is now weird to even think existed. No TV remotes, walk up and change the channel. Rotary phones, city directories and phone books. Need the time and temp? You called the city "time and temp" number. Riding a bicycle to the comic book store and arcade, which were common then. I remember the USSR and my brother and I saw the Challenger blow up on TV at school as if it were 9/11. None of this is the Millennial experience, and they couldn't even describe these details. The world really did change after ~1995, when the internet went mainstream with Win95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs were around and used occasionally but I never felt they were significant enough to change society as the internet did post 1995.
In many ways, if you were born from the early 80s back to the 20s you might have had a fairly similar childhood. Stuff that a kid born after the rather dramatic changes the internet caused will never really experience how the world felt different. Similar to how in my grandmother's childhood, she remembers being the first house in the neighborhood to have electricity hooked up. That's a game changer from previous generations.
I think the typical 20 year generational divide is broken with the advent of certain technologies. There has to be a break between those who meaningfully experienced the world prior to the internet and those who don't really remember life without it.
(The other aspect to this is that when I was young, almost everything I read about "Generation X" was a humungous load of bullshit. So I assume any article about "Millennials" has the same veracity.)
Essentially, I agree with you that technological revolution is what really matters. This business about media consumption identification, whether it was Brady Bunch or Super Mario Bros, doesn't really matter to anyone but the marketers.
cough
http://www.esds1.pt/site/images/stories/isacosta/secondary_p...
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/04/fin...
The old Wikipedia article on XY Cusp before it got edited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JCDenton2052/mh5
Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."
There's definitely no single standard.
What would be vastly sea-change-levels different is the pervasiveness of connectivity and access to a vast store on even real-time information and data about almost everything.
Laptops would've been recognizable, but their utility was severely limited without WiFi, which I think was arguably a bigger transition (wired Internet -> wireless) than BBS -> Internet. So I guess I'm agreeing with you, connectivity was the big phase change!
Laptops were somewhat useful even prior to WiFi. I had my first one in 1997 or so. It was convenient to take work home, for example. But you're right that, viewed through the lens of today, they weren't a huge win relative to wired desktops for many uses.
That's kind of backwards for 1995. Palm Pilots weren't around until 1996, but the first PDA+Phone combo -- a smartphone, except the name wasn't applied to that combination until much later -- was the IBM Simon in 1994 (though the first really popular PDA+Phone was the Nokia 9000 in 1996.) (Obviously, non-Palm PDAs were available and popular before 1995; the Psion Organizer had been around since 1984, and the Psion Series 3 in 1991 was a turning point for the category.)
I completely agree. Born in Zimbabwe in '87, where things (including culture) have always been a little behind - up to and including my childhood including rotary telephones, watching 9/11 on a black-and-white TV and a VIC 20. Keeping in mind that poverty is distinct to debt, I haven't been directly impacted by the debts on the previous generation and genuinely have no idea what other millennials are going on about (although I am slowly warming up to their struggle).
At the very least the formal ranges of generational divides seem to only strictly apply to developed countries.