3 ms·
I don't think so. By way of context: I'm 49. I graduated from high school (US) in 1988. I sort of grew up with the net, in the sense that I got my first Intern
by ubermonkey 8y ago
I don't think so.
By way of context: I'm 49. I graduated from high school (US) in 1988. I sort of grew up with the net, in the sense that I got my first Internet email address in 1987. I definitely grew up with computers; it's people my age that hassled their parents for those 8-bit machines that plugged into televisions.
People of my cohort were definitely aware that we were on the leading edge of computer-mediated societal change. In 1985 it was still possible to hear folks suggest ridiculous things like "Oh, I just run a $small_business; computers will never help here" from people who did not yet Get It. It was bizarre.
I thought, from my teens through my mid-30s, that this sort of fundamental technological illiteracy was the transient phenomenon, and that once people my age got to be 50 or whatever, it would be extinct. This has not come to pass.
Today, I work in software (surprise!). Our product does a particular kind of project management only interesting in very large contexts. It's a staid and conservative market. And yet there are people my age or a little older within our user community who are still clearly baffled by the idea of having multiple applications open at once, or by the basics of file manipulation, or by the idea of importing data from one location to another. It's bizarre.
My boss is 14 years older than I am, so into his middle 60s. He's like me; he's been in or near computing his whole life. Neither of us understand it, but there appears to be an inexhaustible reservoir of folks who just look at anything with an integrated circuit in it and say "Nope!" From our POV, though, it's just NOT OKAY to have worked in data intense business for decades and still be baffled by something as simple as "save-as" or whatever.