Really Gen-W is defined more by what it isn't than what it is. BEFORE us (I mean before we were in high school) came the era of free love, of drugs are fun, of the Vietnam War and Watergate and Kent State and all that.

After us came Sesame Street and Mentos and David Letterman and Jay Leno and the AIDS crisis.

By the time "Schoolhouse Rock" came along, we were supposed to be too old for Saturday morning cartoons. Although you could tell who still watched them, by who was able to recite the preamble to the Constitution as soon as memorizing it was assigned.

While we were in high school, give or take 5 years, we saw the election of Reagan (the first election I was eligible to vote in (and I did)), the Iran hostage crisis, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the first space shuttle being launched, the beginnings of MTV.

Unless you had an older sibling or very young parents, you learned about the Beatles from the "Sergeant Pepper's" movie with Peter Frampton and the BeeGees.

You argued with your classmates about which was better, rock or disco.

The geeks played Dungeons and Dragons. The stoners played hookey. The band played the theme from "Hogan's Heroes."

I actually took my lunch to school in those bags with the yellow smiley face and the "Have a Nice Day" slogan that we got free with fill-ups at Chevron.

We remember full-service gas; presumably most of the Gen-X'ers do not.

The gas crisis was the thing while I was in HS; I remember driving ten miles to find a gas station with a line short enough to get in.

There was a brief period between the time we became sexually aware and the AIDS crisis. "Safe" sex meant nobody got pregnant (or caught).

Paperback books still cost around $3.

There were no computer games because there were no computers. Well, huge banks had them. When we got to college, we played "Quest" on the mainframe when we were supposed to be doing our FORTRAN homework. We took "typing" and not "keyboarding" in high school -- not elementary school! Typewriters with built-in erase tape were still a pretty cool thing. All our papers in college were typed on typewriters.

Video games were things you plugged into your tv. You could play "Pong" and such. Some of the arcades had very primitive computer games. By the time I got to college they had things like Q-bert and Frogger and Pac-Man.

Digital watches were all the rage when I was in high school. "Calculators" for the most part added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, until I was a senior.

Guns and Roses were things you shot with your dad, and gave to your mom, respectively. People still smoked on airplanes, and in offices, and everywhere else.

Aspartame (Nutrasweet) came out when I was in college. Before that sugarless things were sweetened with cyclamates (in Canada) and sodium saccharine (in the US). Saccharine tasted awful.

Diet Coke and New Coke had never been heard of. Classic Coke was just Coke. You didn't have 50,000 types of iced tea and other beverages at the 7-11. The only "sports drink" was Gatorade.

Microwave ovens were something of a novelty; only the really rich people had them until late in our youth. They had knobs you turned, except the real Amana Radarranges, which cost five times as much, and opened like an oven rather than like a refrigerator.

Most of us remember our first color TV but not our first TV. Cable came when we were still young, but not everybody got it. You could get maybe 21 channels. There were only 3 nationwide networks.

These are a few things.

Alex