I’m really confused by your reasoning here. You’re describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay and print it out (or even setup your printer to begin with). You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying everyone capable of using a computer today is equivalent to that level of dedication and curiosity. I’m just saying that in the same way only a handful of people do that today only a handful of people pursued it in the past. It’s become easier to use computers, but hat doesn’t mean there still aren’t people who learn the ins and outs of them today like people had to do in the past to use them.
I think you missed my point, which is that everyone who used a computer back then (less of the overall population) had to at least dip their toes in learning how they worked back then. This meant that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers found out that they really liked them and started going down the rabbit hole on their own from there.
People would get a computer for school, buy a game for it, and have to learn how to fix the computer when the game didn’t work. Hell, in the 80s (as a 90’s kid I missed the boat on this one) there were magazines that included games where you had to type the code for the game (in BASIC) into the computer yourself for the game to run. Many of those magazine games had bugs so if you wanted to fix it you had to learn some basic coding skills to spot the bug/typo in the magazine.
Nowadays such entryways into the computing hobby are far less ubiquitous, you have to seek them out. I’m not saying people now are less capable or less curious or that the hardcore nerds won’t still get into the hobby, I’m saying it used to be required for playing PC games or social interactions online. There used to be incentives for people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried to figure out how computers worked, and as a result a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as would-be computer people ended up getting into computers.
I totally agree, but nobody is saying everyone that uses a computer is a tech wiz. I’m saying there are still plenty of people today interested in digging in deeper just like there were back then. Tech being more accessible today hasn’t led to a decrease in such things, because the people the ease brought in wouldn’t have dug in in the past.
I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.
In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80’s-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don’t need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don’t need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.
You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn’t use to exist because they came as a package deal.
But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code. Arguing otherwise just feels like bemoaning some sort of lost golden days when that’s not the case. It’s because everyone who used to be into these hobbies knew the ins and outs. Now more people are into it so proportionally less know the ins and outs, but I see no reason to believe the absolute number of people who really want to learn the deeper stuff has gone down.
Nobody here was arguing that they don’t. It’s just that computing as a hobby is far more niche than it used to be. Literally everyone who used a computer used to have to be able to troubleshoot issues on their own with nothing but a manual and the machine itself. If they didn’t figure it out, they’d ask a friend who would teach them how to fix it in the future and they just had to remember or they were SOL. You don’t have to do that anymore, so those kinds of skills are less common than they were for prior generations.
I’m not saying young people with those skills don’t exist anymore. I know they do. I’m a senior software engineer and have mentored some of them. I’m trying to talk about the rate at which fundamental computer knowledge and troubleshooting skills are being acquired, not if they are at all.
Please, don’t put words in my mouth.
Edit: alright, since you’ve changed your argument with a stealth edit I’m going to quote the latest revision so my edit doesn’t look irrelevant:
But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code. Arguing otherwise just feels like bemoaning some sort of lost golden days when that’s not the case. It’s because everyone who used to be into these hobbies knew the ins and outs. Now more people are into it so proportionally less know the ins and outs, but I see no reason to believe the absolute number of people who really want to learn the deeper stuff has gone down.
I have several college professor friends who teach in STEM. In the last few years, lessons have needed to be added to teach the fundamentals of computer use, even to classes meant for comp-sci majors. I’m talking about things like managing where files are in the filesystem, how to make a folder, how to rename a file, the extreme basics. These used to be a given. They used to be taught in elementary school because they were necessary life skills at the time. Now they aren’t.
There are people who know that stuff. There’s a high school kid on YouTube who recently built his own laptop, PCBs and all. But this kind of hacking has become the exception. You have to be exceptional to try popping the hood and ask questions and risk breaking things when everything just works. Computers used to break way more often, so people who knew how to fix them were way more common.
I’m not bemoaning the glory of days long gone. Just observing the trends as I see them. I’m quite happy things have gone this way, personally. I was one of the kids who grew up fixing their friends’ parents’ PCs for them in exchange for pizza. Now I get to play video games or do deep dives in other hobbies instead of playing tech support for everyone who knows me well enough to ask for help. The one or two calls I still get per year feel like a refreshing change of pace instead of the burden they once were.
The entire reason I even began commenting on this thread is because someone said this.
teens are not geeking around with computers, they are watching reels and scrolling recommendations and doing other bullshit
My entire argument the whole time has been that back in the day, plenty of kids weren’t doing computing related things. Plenty were doing “other bullshit” back then. My point has been the same the entire time. Just because computing as a hobby has a lower barrier to entry doesn’t mean that there are less people overall interested in learning more. You just keep repeating back to me that proportionally less people who use computers today really know them deeply. I’ve never said anything otherwise. I jist see no reason to believe that as a whole there are less people who want to know them on a deeper level.
You point out things like files being a difficult concept for younger people today because it’s been abstracted away. My response to that would be merely knowing what a file is was never what we’ve been talking about. Of millennials, what percentage knows about files and how to save them? 99% or so? Just a guess, it doesn’t really matter the exact number. Do you believe 99% of millennials are tech geniuses on the way to becoming “FOSS graybeards”? No! Of course not! Basic computer usage has always been a different skill set than what I’ve been talking about.
Unless you have some sort of data about the amount of young people going into things like computer science is substantially lower today than it was in the '80s then I see no reason to believe otherwise. We live in a golden age of cheap electronics and easily accessible information. The barrier to entry for curious people wanting to learn more about computers than having them act as basic machines that can make documents, edit pictures, and play games is arguably lower than ever.
The days of old required everyone to learn more to be able to use computers, but I don’t believe this translated to more experienced people then than today overall, especially not more people willing to contribute back to the community back then than today.
I’m really confused by your reasoning here. You’re describing how it was extremely difficult to you and you had to go to great lengths to learn technology. Not everyone did this back then not does everyone do it now.
That was the stuff you needed to do to do things like: play video games on your computer, get online and chat with people, hell even use your PC to write an essay and print it out (or even setup your printer to begin with). You didn’t necessarily have to go as far as they described to do that stuff, but you had to do some of it.
Nowadays there’s no equivalent. You don’t have to at least kinda understand the filesystem to play minecraft on your iPad.
I think you’re missing my point. I’m not saying everyone capable of using a computer today is equivalent to that level of dedication and curiosity. I’m just saying that in the same way only a handful of people do that today only a handful of people pursued it in the past. It’s become easier to use computers, but hat doesn’t mean there still aren’t people who learn the ins and outs of them today like people had to do in the past to use them.
I think you missed my point, which is that everyone who used a computer back then (less of the overall population) had to at least dip their toes in learning how they worked back then. This meant that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten interested in computers found out that they really liked them and started going down the rabbit hole on their own from there.
People would get a computer for school, buy a game for it, and have to learn how to fix the computer when the game didn’t work. Hell, in the 80s (as a 90’s kid I missed the boat on this one) there were magazines that included games where you had to type the code for the game (in BASIC) into the computer yourself for the game to run. Many of those magazine games had bugs so if you wanted to fix it you had to learn some basic coding skills to spot the bug/typo in the magazine.
Nowadays such entryways into the computing hobby are far less ubiquitous, you have to seek them out. I’m not saying people now are less capable or less curious or that the hardcore nerds won’t still get into the hobby, I’m saying it used to be required for playing PC games or social interactions online. There used to be incentives for people who otherwise wouldn’t have tried to figure out how computers worked, and as a result a lot of people who didn’t necessarily think of themselves as would-be computer people ended up getting into computers.
I totally agree, but nobody is saying everyone that uses a computer is a tech wiz. I’m saying there are still plenty of people today interested in digging in deeper just like there were back then. Tech being more accessible today hasn’t led to a decrease in such things, because the people the ease brought in wouldn’t have dug in in the past.
I really think it has led to a reduction in the rate at which otherwise average people wind up in tech because they like it, as opposed to for money.
In other words, the computing hobby has declined from its heyday in the 80’s-early 00s. Most people who build their own PC now can do so with about 10 minutes of help from YouTube and tools like PCPartsPicker, which helps a lot with accessibility, but the trade off is that the people who get into computers now don’t need to spend as much time on them to get into them. They don’t need to build up as much foundational knowledge, so now that knowledge has become rarer, even within e.g. the indie PC gaming hobby.
You can literally make an entire video game without writing any code. This is phenomenal if you want to make games easily, but it also gives coding a level of inaccessibility even in the minds of people getting into making video games that didn’t use to exist because they came as a package deal.
But plenty of people still do learn the deeper stuff. Just because you can write a game without code doesn’t mean everyone who makes games is doing it without code. Arguing otherwise just feels like bemoaning some sort of lost golden days when that’s not the case. It’s because everyone who used to be into these hobbies knew the ins and outs. Now more people are into it so proportionally less know the ins and outs, but I see no reason to believe the absolute number of people who really want to learn the deeper stuff has gone down.
Nobody here was arguing that they don’t. It’s just that computing as a hobby is far more niche than it used to be. Literally everyone who used a computer used to have to be able to troubleshoot issues on their own with nothing but a manual and the machine itself. If they didn’t figure it out, they’d ask a friend who would teach them how to fix it in the future and they just had to remember or they were SOL. You don’t have to do that anymore, so those kinds of skills are less common than they were for prior generations.
I’m not saying young people with those skills don’t exist anymore. I know they do. I’m a senior software engineer and have mentored some of them. I’m trying to talk about the rate at which fundamental computer knowledge and troubleshooting skills are being acquired, not if they are at all.
Please, don’t put words in my mouth.
Edit: alright, since you’ve changed your argument with a stealth edit I’m going to quote the latest revision so my edit doesn’t look irrelevant:
I have several college professor friends who teach in STEM. In the last few years, lessons have needed to be added to teach the fundamentals of computer use, even to classes meant for comp-sci majors. I’m talking about things like managing where files are in the filesystem, how to make a folder, how to rename a file, the extreme basics. These used to be a given. They used to be taught in elementary school because they were necessary life skills at the time. Now they aren’t.
There are people who know that stuff. There’s a high school kid on YouTube who recently built his own laptop, PCBs and all. But this kind of hacking has become the exception. You have to be exceptional to try popping the hood and ask questions and risk breaking things when everything just works. Computers used to break way more often, so people who knew how to fix them were way more common.
I’m not bemoaning the glory of days long gone. Just observing the trends as I see them. I’m quite happy things have gone this way, personally. I was one of the kids who grew up fixing their friends’ parents’ PCs for them in exchange for pizza. Now I get to play video games or do deep dives in other hobbies instead of playing tech support for everyone who knows me well enough to ask for help. The one or two calls I still get per year feel like a refreshing change of pace instead of the burden they once were.
The entire reason I even began commenting on this thread is because someone said this.
My entire argument the whole time has been that back in the day, plenty of kids weren’t doing computing related things. Plenty were doing “other bullshit” back then. My point has been the same the entire time. Just because computing as a hobby has a lower barrier to entry doesn’t mean that there are less people overall interested in learning more. You just keep repeating back to me that proportionally less people who use computers today really know them deeply. I’ve never said anything otherwise. I jist see no reason to believe that as a whole there are less people who want to know them on a deeper level.
You point out things like files being a difficult concept for younger people today because it’s been abstracted away. My response to that would be merely knowing what a file is was never what we’ve been talking about. Of millennials, what percentage knows about files and how to save them? 99% or so? Just a guess, it doesn’t really matter the exact number. Do you believe 99% of millennials are tech geniuses on the way to becoming “FOSS graybeards”? No! Of course not! Basic computer usage has always been a different skill set than what I’ve been talking about.
Unless you have some sort of data about the amount of young people going into things like computer science is substantially lower today than it was in the '80s then I see no reason to believe otherwise. We live in a golden age of cheap electronics and easily accessible information. The barrier to entry for curious people wanting to learn more about computers than having them act as basic machines that can make documents, edit pictures, and play games is arguably lower than ever.
The days of old required everyone to learn more to be able to use computers, but I don’t believe this translated to more experienced people then than today overall, especially not more people willing to contribute back to the community back then than today.