Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?
Do you think millennials who grew up with the early Internet and home computers will be as bad with future technology as boomers are with current technology?
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We're in our early 40s.
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The discussions here about how "today's tech is so dumbed down" kinda makes me laugh, because it's what I was saying when Windows 95 released.
I'll write my own config.sys and autoexec.bat in DOS like god intended, thank you!
I don't think auto exec.bat is a thing DOS can understand.
autoexec.bat is what you want.
Auto-correct. It's fixed.
I know. I was just making the easy joke.
I mean, windows 95 was kind of the tipping point for consumer GUI-first general purpose computing, right? For the common person, using a computer went from reading manpages and learning syntax (at least the bare minimum required to launch a GUI shell), to being presented with a much more limited set of easily discoverable operations.
Gen Z using chromebooks and iPads are just the extension of that. The operations exposed by an application are generally way more limited than they were on windows 9x, and also way more discoverable.
As a gen-z, no one would use chromebooks if they had the option not to. Schools force them on everyone.
Yeah nobody is blaming you homie.
Sort of. Macs were doing this in the 80's but they were super expensive. Still a popular option for schools, though. Growing up, we usually had Apple II's in class (88-93ish) with Macs in some classrooms. It wasn't until around the '95 era or just before that home computers became affordable, so it's probably most people's major exposure to GUI computing. Prior to '95, if you had a computer in the home, it was probably DOS-based and you maybe used WIn3.1. But Win3.1 wasn't great, and quite a lot of home computers at this time were too underpowered to do much running it, so although I had access to Win3.1, in practice even at about 10yrs old, I just booted to DOS and often had to run programs off of floppies because HDD space was super limited and very expensive. When '95 dropped, it was definitely a paradigm shift in my house to go to that being the primary interface instead of DOS.
OS/2 had a following back then too. I was running BBS software on it, around the time of Win95's release. I'd started dabbling with Linux, but h/w compatibility was an issue back then - I ran it without X for a year or so, and it beat DOS in many ways. When I got X working, OS/2 lost most of its value to me. I do remember missing REXX though.
I don't think the common person was reading manpages. The common person was probably just not using a computer for that particular task. I don't think GenZ has fewer "techy people" , they just have a lower percentage of them compared to previous generations because personal tech is so widespread and easy to use now.
Yeah, but if the common person were using a computer, they would be reading manpages. For the common person, using a computer meant reading manpages. Which is exactly what I said.
Also, having fewer techy people is the same thing as having a lower percentage when the population size is similar (which it is). If gen z has a lower percentage of techy people, that means they have fewer techy people.
Holy moly man.