4 ms·

> If you had to ..., you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back

> If you had to ..., you got way more technical education than someone that grows up with sleek touch screen mobile devices that self update over wifi and back up everything to the cloud. Maybe a little. But: Us older folks have more technical education because we actually had technical education in school. We had actually schooling where we learned to type, learned to use word processing, to do this and to do that. My grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley and used a computer every day. My father had to do programming on the university mainframe to solve his college psychology homework. We are now in the 4th or 5th generation of workers that are expected to be "tech savvy" at work. But this is the first in which we've completely abandoned the idea of teaching them how to be "tech savvy". And it's not going well. Who would have thought???

wink 4y ago
I don't know how old you are or how close the generations run in your family but this is so far off my reality I've had to reread this. I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.) This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.
chrisco255 4y ago
If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  > If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer. And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better. David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did. That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)

wink 4y ago

I don't know how old you are or how close the generations run in your family but this is so far off my reality I've had to reread this. I'm close to 40 and my parents got the first computer just because they had a company and it was to replace an electric typewriter in 94/95. We knew like 3 other families who had a computer. Everything you call technical education was a complete joke when I was in school (mostly the 90s), but yes, my mom learned touch typing on a mechanical typewriter many years ago - but that's about it. (Also I think there was a single person in my parents' generation who had gone to university.) This also kinda matches my experience with my peers of the same age. We learned everything ourselves because computers were fancy and new and we had them in our teenage years.

chrisco255 4y ago

If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. The general public didn't really start to adopt personal computers en masse until the 90s. And if you look at, for example, conversations between David Letterman and Bill Gates regarding the internet in the 1995 (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tgODUgHeT5Y), and Gates tries to explain to him the advantage of it and David pans that he doesn't get it, with the audience laughing along to dismissive jokes about it being unnecessary complexity versus radio and cassette tapes. That was the prevailing attitude regarding computers even well into the 90s (now, they're pervasive).

Kon-Peki 4y ago
> If your grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley, and your dad programmed a university mainframe, you aren't representative of the general public. Hey, maybe so. But as it turned out, I went to pretty-damn-bad public school in the rust belt. We had those Acer clones of the Apple II in every classroom starting in kindergarten/first grade. We learned to type and played math and word games. And then IBM PC clones in the school library in middle school and high school, learning WordPerfect on DOS because they made special writing assignments just so we had to use a computer. And in my working class neighborhood, where a house cost about $50,000 in 1990, about every other family had a Commodore 64 or better. David Letterman made a career out of acting dumb for laughs. That's what he did. That exchange between him and Gates was him acting dumb so that Gates could hit a home run, and Gates whiffed. To record a radio-broadcast baseball game with a tape recorder, somebody needed to be physically located within the broadcast range of the station at the time of the broadcast. And then stop and start the recording between half-innings just to have any hope of fitting the whole game on a single cassette. And then get the cassette to you, wherever you are. The internet broadcast eliminated all of those constraints. I appreciate watching that video clip, it demonstrates just how little Gates understood the potential of the internet in those "early days" :)