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.
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.
Well I am that one generation then.
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?
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.
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.
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
Yes. We are.
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.
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 :'(
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.
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.
When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.
I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.
Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don’t remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.
In twenty years, I’m sure they’ll know more than me, just because I’ll be retired and they’ll be in the thick of it.
Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents’ generation learned. I’m clueless.
Since you mentioned cars, here is a theory my coworker told me that I think makes a lot of sense.
Our parents were the last generation to learn about cars because back then you needed to know how a car worked in order to own one. Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
We are the last generation to learn how computers work since we needed to know how a computer worked in order to use it. Now computers are too simple to use and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
Obviously not saying nobody today knows how cars or computers work, but it is a lot less common. Anybody who learns about cars or computers today do it because of personal interest, not because of necessity.
Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
I mean, I’d argue they’re too complex. But I agree, you need so many specialized widgets (many that vary by brand and model) that its impractical to do more than change the oil.
I was looking at a Model A on display at a dealership when I went car shopping recently. They had the engine open, and I was looking at the thing thinking “If you sent me this in a box as a ‘Build your own car’ kit, I’m pretty sure I could do it”.
Sorry I meant simple to use. Repair and maintenance is very complex. You often can not even do some maintenance since you need specialized tools or software that only mechanics have access to.
Cars are too simple now and you couldn’t fix one even if you wanted to since they are so locked-down.
Yes, same thing between computing hardware (I’m not gonna say computers, because for a lot of people nowadays, their only device is their smartphone) and cars. It used to be that things were more complicated to use, but easier to repair, so a large percentage of users could also repair their things.
Nowadays, you don’t even need to know how to check your oil level because the car will tell you if it’s low. You might not even have a dipstick. And with service intervals being 25000km and more, how much are you REALLY saving by doing your own oil change and stuff? I still do it, but
Similarly - as a kid, I had to fix small issues that popped up with Windows XP ALL the time. Couldn’t connect to any website? Flush the DNS cache. No connectivity at all? ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew. Mouse stopped working AGAIN? Use the keyboard to navigate to devices, reinstall mouse driver.
If I was growing up right now, I’d have no idea how things work, because they JUST DO. So you don’t learn a lot anymore. As for cars, I still learned because I grew up poor, so my first car was around 500 euros and I did everything myself.
Decided on a whim to fix up an old car from the 80s. I was able to tear it down to the frame and reassemble it with not much more than a set of imperial wrenches. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but not much. And while there was a lot that could go wrong there was nothing that was a black box where you could get to a point where if something was wrong you would throw up your hands and say, “Oh, well. Guess this is garbage now!” Different time, I guess.
Yup, now you spend several hundred on a Chinese clone of whatever factory diagnostics tool allows you to code modules and such. And there are still probably things you can’t touch.
Local Area Network Network.
Sorry I couldn’t resist.
RAS syndrome
ATM machine
I’m going to interpret that last “network” as that extra f-ing 50 ohm bnc terminator that you’re pretty sure you don’t need, until you’re about to learn something about coax impedence matching.
