I think centralization played a big role in this, at least for software. When messaging meant IRC, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Xfire, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or any number of PHP forums, you had to be able to pick up new software quickly and conceptualized the thing it’s doing separate from the application it’s accomplished with. When they all needed to be installed from different places in different ways you conceptualize the file system and what an executable is to an extent. When every game needs a bit of debugging to get working and a bit of savvy to know when certain computer parts are incompatible, you need a bit of knowledge to do the thing you want to do.
That said, fewer people did it. I was in highschool when Facebook took off, and the number of people who went from never online to perpetually online skyrocketed.
I teach computer science, I know it isn’t wholly generational, but I’ve watched the decline over the past decade for the basics. Highschool students were raised on Chromebooks and tablets/phones and a homogenous software scene. Concepts like files, installations, computer components, local storage, compression, settings, keyboard proficiency, toolbars, context menus - these are all barriers for incoming students.
The big difference, I think, is that way more people (nearly everyone) has some technical proficiency, whereas before it was considered a popular enough hobby but most people were completely inept, but most of students nowadays are not proficient with things past a cursory level. That said, the ones who are technically inclined are extremely technically inclined compared to my era, in larger numbers at least.
Higher minimum and maximum thresholds, but maybe lower on average.
Boomer here. As a lifelong software developer I’ve always known more about computers than most people in my age group generally, but I’ve always assumed younger people know more than I do because they’ve grown up with so much more tech. Maybe they tend to be more at user-level with it. I’ve never thought about that.
We must be the Oracles. We must preserve the ancient knowledge.
Bold of you to claim most millennials understand how a computer works.
Gen X ! Raised on hose water, neglect, and flaky tech.
Funny, I assumed it was about millennials.
Everybody but Gen X forgets about Gen X.
We generally don’t mind.
Hey remember when computers become essential to day to day life and schools started making it part of their curriculum? Yeah me neither.
For gen x and millennials, they got those skills for free cause their toys incentivized them. As in we got that for free.
It was never guaranteed for that to keep being true. And giving you basic knowledge for the world is usually what schools should do but they never did cause there is money to be made with dumbed down tools.
I work in tech.
My dad was a teacher, his subject was computers, at that time “computers” class was heavily programming. Basic stuff.
It seems that kids from gen x, and the millennial generation had the timing to learn the tech before it “just works”, so we’re used to figuring it out as we go, because there was no way to look it up on the internet, so we had to.
The zoomers and younger generations are largely “it just works” users, where all the basics of getting things to just plug and play was a thing. If it didn’t work it was either “incompatible” or broken. So don’t try to make it work, or you’ll be sued for DMCA related violations.
IMO, there’s a sweet spot, somewhere in the late 70’s or early 80’s to about the early-mid 2000’s when people had to know something about tech to operate it. Anyone with the aptitude for tech, who was born during this time is generally working in tech.
People born before that are generally the old school pen and paper types, and anyone younger is generally the plug and play digital era.
If course, everyone is different, so the dates are probably liable to be different depending on the area, and each person may have different motivations, etc.
My generation (early millennials) are generally known for being the “tech” person to friends/family, and ADHD; at least, as far as I can see, from my little bubble of friends who mostly work in/with tech.
Yup, agree with this.
And this is why I’m teaching my kids computer stuff. We haven’t gotten too crazy with it, but my kids have built some stuff in Scratch and helped me assemble my PC (they’ll assemble their own) with me explaining what the main bits do. I also intend to do some basic Arduino-type stuff w/ them as well once I get started w/ home automation (have a NAS and some apps, but no sensors or anything cool like that).
They’ll probably never need that knowledge, but having the ability to reason about a problem using some foundational knowledge should be useful regardless of what they do (i.e. why isn’t this working? I’ll check the wires, run a simpler test, etc).
But do they have to set jumpers on the motherboard to choose the processor voltage?
And make sure the IRQs on their sound card and printer don’t conflict ?
Kids these days don’t know how good they have it…
Yep, pretty much this. I grew up with computers. The first one I used was a C64 in school. We got our first family PC in 1996. I was 14 back then.
If you wanted to do basically anything, you had to figure it out or read an actual manual. We had to fight with drivers and such in order to get any game or device working. It was part of the fun; you had to be nerdy to want to do that.
Nowadays, even my completely tech illiterate dad can use an iPad to browse, e-mail, stream stuff and connect on social media.
To be clear: my dad phoned me this morning asking how he could set the time on his digital Casio watch. And he’s using an iPad!! That’s how easy we were able to make tech, so even a toddler can use it.
I feel very lucky that I grew up with tech and can solve most problems on my own.
Well I am that one generation then.
My dad can write DOS commands better than most people my age can and I work in Tech. beyond that? he’s clueless. Younger generations can either type with their thumbs or their index fingers and know absolutely nothing about how things work. If it’s an app they can open on their phones or tablet devices then perfect, they’re all over it. Beyond that? no way.
People my age and from my generation can type well, can figure things out and fix issues on computers, and know our way around tech. Why? cause we were raised in an age where things were essentially “kicking off”. I was taught typing in high school. Beyond that most of us used AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, mIRC, etc so if we weren’t taught it in high school we learned it that way.
We learned html, php, javascript, etc via Geocities, setting up PHP messageboards, hell even just customizing our Myspace page. younger generations don’t have anything like that so they don’t know it. We learned it in our free time to customize our online experience. We had daily consistent shows like The ScreenSavers or Call for Help to teach us how to use Windows or even introduce us to Linux. I learned to build my first PC thanks to Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton. countless magazines and books to pick up to read how to do stuff. And in those days if you wanted to game on PC you pretty much had to build your own PC. No one made prebuilt custom gaming pcs. So you had to learn that stuff.
Today things are all prebuilt for you. gaming pcs, phones and tablet apps, etc. People today just want things to “just work” and if there’s anything needed beyond opening an app and logining in then they’re not interested. Finding and signing up for instances? forget it.
Ugh I wish you hadn’t reminded me of screensavers. I loved that show! Now I feel old and sad haha
I love Leo and Patrick. I think Leo is still doing The New ScreenSavers and Patrick is off doing an AV podcast last I checked. I miss their shows on rev3 too
I suspect that back in the day there was a generation that were “the only ones who knew how cars worked” (in that it had a far higher number of people who could do their own car repairs).
It’s the product of having grown up in a time when that technology was going from niche to widespread - a time when its still clunky, fickle and needs a lot of babysitting and before it was mainly made “so simple that any idiot can use it” - so if you were one of those people who got into it back then, you were forced to understand it more in depth merely to keep it going. Those who grew up before that simply never became familiar with it, whilst those who grew up later only ever had to understand how to the mature-stage user interfaces of that Tech, which are designed for maximum accessibility with minimum learning curve (which amongst other things means minimizing the need for deep understanding of what’s going on) and did not need to know how to maintain it since “maintenance” had by then become “get a new one and click this button to migrate your info”.
You can see a similar thing going on with 3D printers: earlier models are fickle and need all sorts of tweaks and understanding of what’s going on to get decent prints out of them plus required frequent maintenance (amongst other things, you quite literally have to periodically retighten the screws of whatever kit FDM printer you got otherwise print quality worsens over time) whilst the later consumer-oriented products make everything simpler.
I don’t think that’s true, the length of time that cars were simple enough to do most of your own maintenance lasted a long time, from the very first cars through to the 80s or so, until computerisation meant the only real fault finding you could do was swapping parts without specialist equipment.
I grew up in the 80s and most people around could only ever do the whole “check the oil level and add some more if needed” and the same for the water for the window wipers.
Granted, nowadays some people can’t even do the latter.
It’s true not everyone could do it, but things like checking timing, adjusting carburettors etc is something people can learn from reading a manual or watching a video.
I too grew up in the in that era. But grew up in the Detroit area where nearly everybody knew something about cars due to how many people worked in the auto industry and how the knowledge was prevelant and shared amongst friends and peers. Auto shops were still a thing, but largely used for jobs nobody wanted to do, didn’t have access to the tools, or didn’t have the time to invest
Cries in Ender 3 :'(
Yes. We are.
I feel this meme so much, TPM. I had to look up how to reinstall Windows 10 for my kid’s computer because it was all messed up. I don’t know my way around Windows anymore, but she’s apparently unable to just look this shit up and do it herself.
Wait, sort of like my parents and in-laws…
It’s worse than that: we’re a small subset of the only generations that know how computers work. The vast majority of my peers would balk at using a command line, much less anything deeper.
I say generations because it’s obviously not limited to one, but, it sure as fuck isn’t many.
Yeah, the era of the ‘genius computer wiz kid’ had a small percentage of people working significantly with computers, but they were very obvious. You either knew your way around the computer very well and used it heavily, or just didn’t use a computer if you could help it.
I remember growing up the other teens would hate being forced to use a computer to type up an assignment, and would ask “can’t I just hand write it?”. We are talking about a percent or two, even among the age group, that would seriously use computers.
Now every kid uses “computers” constantly, but their level of understanding is about the same as the folks that formerly just wouldn’t bother trying back when the computers demanded you fiddle with TSRs, config.sys, autexec.bat, jumpers, dip switches to get things just right, and just right from application to application (this application demands XMS, this other demands EMS). For most kids of the era, maybe they’d use a computer with a word processing application on it, and otherwise they would play with a game console, which was far less finicky.
Between computers and navigating the stupid interface of VCRs of the time, you had TV shows pick up on the whiz kid as a meme (Wesley Crusher in TNG, Lucas Wolenczak in SeaQuest, so many sitcoms of the time would have one…). However they weren’t the prolific folks. Most kids of the time didn’t have time for computers (which also commonly showed up in the sitcoms, the cool jock would have the nerd whiz kid pull some stuff for him, because he sure couldn’t be bothered to deal with computers).
your kids will be fixing your 3D holographic projection glasses or some shit like that dont worry
A) Nuh uh because I’m not buying that bullshit in the first place
B) Not without forcing the right to repair.
my grandma who didnt want a smartphone was right
“Damn right she was!” He ironically typed from his cell phone, “Long live T9!”
But by then the solution will be “oh dad, you didn’t subscribe to Projecto Pro Premium. No wonder all your ads are in 2D!”
If by “fixing” you mean ordering the next model as replacement on some data-gobbling online marketplace that only allows registration by a current brain implant, then maybe.
If only that were true. Have you seen how integrated vr goggles are for example? They’re borderline unfixable.
As a millenial nurse watching gen z new grads hunt and peck with their index fingers to write a shift note, 100%. I don’t think my parents really appreciated how much constantly being on AIM with my friends as a tween actually really benefited my typing skills in a way that’s been much more valuable to my career than algebra.
All the math you need to be a nurse is ratio / proportion and kitchen measurements to track I/O. With a modern EMR system (electronic medical record) that does most of the math for you you don’t even need that. The rest is latin and greek root words for various body parts and fluids and a vague understanding of how they’re all related (hyper-tension in the cerebral is bad because the cerebral is surrounded by a bone case and bones no stretch. That means the cerebral pops out of the bone holes and once it’s done that it does NOT go back in correctly like a squeezy ball toy). That gets you through the board exams.
After a year or two in practice you’ve just seen the same shit with a millimeter of difference over and over and over that you either know what to do about it or who to call to do something about it. And when shit is about to go REALLY wrong that’s also happened enough times that you get a weird feeling and just start calling everybody because your psych patient has been trying to kill you for the past week and an hour ago they suddenly stopped trying to kill you and now you have to explain to an RRT nurse (rental ICU nurse) why you’re upset that the patient isn’t trying to kill you.
Gotta love it when you come into a bit of a bitch & moan article about Tech and end up learning something new about Human Physiology and Medicine.
Cheers for that!
Another fun fact: the psychiatric term for my speech pattern (well, typing, but they’re both revealing of thought content), is “tangential!” It can be indicative of mania or psychosis but in this case it’s just ADHD so bad the neuropsychiatrist thought I was faking for drugs. They said my recent memory tests like I have dementia (sort of, mostly the rote part when they ask if you remember the random words they told you at the beginning). I’m really good at a bunch of the hands-on stuff but the EMR really saves my bacon on remembering everything.
Well, if I understood it correctly, my mother is very much like that (for example: it’s very hard to keep her on track to get to the end of a story without her getting lost of some lateral explanation about an explanation about a relativelly unimportant detail in the main story) and even I tended to work like that in the past (not so much nowadays), so your whole post for me was easy peasy to follow and a satisfying learning experience because it went into all sorts of interesting places :)
Judging by the upvotes from others, I would say I’m far from the only one.
It probably helps that here and in this post you’re basically talking about complex and interesting things to a pool of people with lots of above average intelligence, Education and/or curiosity ones.
