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.
Among other things I am responsible for setting up our users with software, and the young folk are not really any more capable than average boomers with PCs. They don’t understand the file system, basic cables, or even the most basic Windows settings.
basic cables
Bless his heart but we had a new guy setting his dock station up a couple years ago now, he tried daisy chaining his monitors display input together to make a dual display set up. We were small talking about our PC setup a little bit before this interaction. This was my moment of “what happened?”
We must be the Oracles. We must preserve the ancient knowledge.
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.
BORN INTO WINDOWS 3, STAYED FOR 7, FORCED TO 11.
I’ve used most versions of Windows since 3.11 I didn’t bother going backwards because as far as I’m concerned, before 3.11, it was better to use DOS. Since then I’ve used 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and of course 11.
About the only one I “missed” was NT, and I’m not unhappy about that. My notes are: 3.11 was basically just an application running on DOS, which was fine, but it’s not really improving much. Few applications supported Windows at that point, so there was little reason to have/use it. 95 was hot garbage at launch, and did not improve much over time, however it was such a drastic change from DOS/3.11 that it was the best we could have hoped for at the time. 98 was forgettable, very little improvement over 95; at least until 98 SE came out, adding USB support, which changed a lot of things. ME was fine for the most part, they put to much emphasis on making it look better without making significant improvements beyond that; however, ME was fine and stable after a few service packs.
XP was the favorite for most, I saw it as Windows 2000 with makeup. That said, the biggest improvement here was the change over to the NT kernel, something we still use today. Windows 2000 was a favorite of mine, it was visually simpler than ME/XP, but all the functionality you needed was there. It was fairly barebones but that allowed for Windows to take a back seat to whatever you were actually using the computer for.
Vista was hated, but not because it was actually bad. The problem with Vista was that the system requirements to run Windows shot up significantly with Aero. At the same time, Microsoft introduced driver updates for security, so many older devices, built for XP, that were more or less abandoned, never got drivers that met the security constraints added in Vista. Vista also launched around the netbook era, when “a computer for every child” was a thing. The hardware was trending towards less powerful, cheaper chips, while Vista was requiring much more from the hardware, creating a perfect storm of people buying Celeron systems pre-installed with Vista and having a very bad time. Anyone using a Core/Core2/first gen Core I* chip had a lot fewer problems.
When Windows 7 launched, most people had abandoned Celeron as a product, and most hardware manufacturers were distributing drivers with the extra security needed for Vista (which was also required for 7), so everything went smoothly and 7 became the next favorite. I don’t have any complaints with 7, and I would be happy to keep using Windows 7 if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s abandonware.
Windows 8 was a solution looking for a problem. This was the era of Android honeycomb, the odd version of Android made exclusively for tablets. Microsoft seemed to think it was a good idea to do the same, however, sales of tablet windows systems are fairly paltry overall, so forcing everyone into a tablet optimized interface proved to be a bad idea, they “fixed” it with 8.1, and nobody cared. I had purchased a Microsoft surface pro 3 at the time, which was pre-installed with Windows 8, and I found that it was fine, but it was both a lackluster tablet, and a fairly bad laptop, it was an inbetween hybrid that was (again) a solution looking for a problem. Despite having one of the “more powerful” pro 3 units (I think I had the second from the top SKU, core i5), it frequently overheated, making it uncomfortable to use as a tablet, and due to thermal throttling, it was not performant as a laptop. It was a nice idea, executed poorly, solving a problem that nobody had.
10, in my opinion, is the gold standard. At least, until they started loading windows up with spyware. Any tracking, advertising ID garbage, or similar, was basically the worst part of Windows 10, and everything else was essentially a return to form and function for many things. To me it was like an evolution of Windows 2000. Not many frills, and windows mostly fades into the background so you can focus on what you’re trying to accomplish.
11 is trying to overhaul your experience, and doing so badly. Control panel, apps, and even your right-click menu is being done differently… They’re pushing you to do it the “new” Microsoft way, and so far, I haven’t met anyone that prefers anything that way.
IMO, 11 is a lot of Microsoft shoving terrible options in your face by default and whispering in your ear “you know you like it like that”
No, we don’t. Fuck off with your bullshit, fuck “new” teams, fuck “new” Outlook, fuck everything you’re slapping a “new” label on. We don’t want this.
Windows 11 is the best advertisement for Linux and Mac products so far.
My housemate is completely incapable of installing mods without using a mod manager, so when my subscription to vortex lapsed he wanted my help and I was like, “look… just read the fucking instructions man, odds are it’ll tell you exactly what to do”
When I went to install a suite of emulators on the Steam Deck, it was one installer and some light configuration. Installing ROMs involved using an app that automatically digs up the box art and adds console collections to the Steam interface.
All of this largely just worked.
As a millenial that was wild. I’ve never trusted things to just work before but a bunch of open-source devs made it happen. That’s what made me realize we live in different times (and why newer generations have no idea how to actually use computers).
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 ?
“your sound card works perfectly”
Kids these days don’t know how good they have it…
They probably never will.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We made it easier, and they’re reaping the benefits of our work.
The only issue I see is that when it breaks, nobody will know how to fix it, since we’ve abstracted all the complexity away from the users, so they don’t understand the underlying processes that need to work for the thing to function.
Other than that, it just works.
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.
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.
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.
Lmao, the middle child of generations
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
Bold of you to claim most millennials understand how a computer works.
They don’t understand a lot, but when you say things like “browser to the D: drive and attach the document called ‘not porn.jpg’ to an email, and send it to me”, you will likely get that email.
You can’t say the same about other generations because they don’t interact with the technology in the same way, if at all.
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.
90s-late 00s cars are actually on repairability in my experience, because they already have computers which help you diagnose failures easily with a $20 OBD2 scanner (this saved my ass a couple of times, when I could almost immediately see the error whenever my car died, fiddle or re-plug the wiring of the failed component and keep going), and they don’t yet have all the over-complicated, designed-to-fail, hard-to-reach crap that a lot of new cars have.
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
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.
Cries in Ender 3 :'(
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.
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).
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…
Yes. We are.
We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn’t user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.
Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.
Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.
Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
I’m fairly certain that’s related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.
I had the biggest flashback right now. I had a Canon BJC 4000 that would only print all the pages if you had two or more empty pages at the end of the document. Never figured that one out, but every so often I open an old Word Doc and find extra empty pages and remember…
Random BSOD from changing… absolutely fucking nothing, then spending 2 days trying to recover, before saying fuck it and reinstalling windows, so you can play WC1 or D1…good old days.
Also printers can suck it. 20 years ago maintaining a fucking print server was bullshit… I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
Sometimes I’d put a floppy disk in. It had 1.jpg crushed down to be 256 colors. Pam Anderson.
For the longest time it would crash windows 95 when I put it in the drive and opened the folder.
It had a “-” dash in the title…I took that out and no more blue screening.
Thanks Bill Gates…
I’d rather deal with BES for another 100 years.
Cool it, Mario… oh, the menus -shivers-
Lol I might have to take that back…BES was a pile of epic smoldering shit…even the engineers would tell me it was shit. I’m pretty sure I reinstalled that damn thing a thousand times. It was like winning the lottery when the CEO finally wanted and iPhone and then forced the reset of the company to android or iPhone… myself and my junior admin had beers in the office when we got the last user off it and got to shut it down on a Friday. Best day ever.
Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.
Lol so true
Installing a printer is still often a deal with the devil
Yeah. I’ve had to return printers that wouldn’t let me install drivers without also agreeing to install spyware.
I had a boot floppy I needed to use when I wanted to play Sim City 2000 because my PCs usual configuration didn’t have enough free conventional memory.
I had another one for Zone66 because its memory management was incompatible with EMM386.
The hardest thing I remember having to do to install games was if they were DOS games and you have to manually assign all the hardware ports or whatever (I remember one for “IRQ?”) for the game every time you ran it and if you fucked it up, it wouldn’t have a picture or wouldn’t have sound or they would be fucked up.
Not quite old enough to have actually had to type in the program after buying the game on a book. That would have been rad!
More likely from soundcard settings than printer settings. If you’re channelling, its due to wrong number of channels selected.
That’s the weird thing. I used Soundblaster cards, and those blackouts were usually preceded by nightmares of an anthropomorphic goat. It was handy because you could make arrangements to feed the dog and stuff.
Well I am that one generation then.
