“Kids who grew up on smartphones do not know how to do anything on a computer”

Re:“Kids who grew up on smartphones do not know how to do an... by dragonwriter on Thursday October 07, 2021 @02:28PM (#28790315)

I think the sweet spot was people growing up in the time that their early experience spanned the DOS & 8-bit era into the ubiquity of GUIs (say mid-1980s to mid-1990s), which may reflect my own familiarity bias though I was technically a little earlier than that.

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Re:“Kids who grew up on smartphones do not know how to do an... by CRConrad on Saturday October 09, 2021 @11:17AM (#28810585)

I'll second that. Saw some early PC and even wrote a basic Basic program in, must have been math class in the gymnasium (~"high school", class 10-12), but really started using computers at university in 1985 -- first a minicomputer with TTY (and even some printing!) terminals in 1985, then PCs a year or so later. First with a colourful menu system (Press 1 for DisplayWriter, 2 for MINITAB, etc) [1], then Windows 3 a year or so after that.

My son, recently of age, has no fucking idea about anything beneath the GUI. OTOH, my somewhat older stepson is a games and recently "full stack" -- which has something to do with tis newfangled Web thingy, I think -- programmer. (OTGH, fuck knows what he knows of anything beneath Unity and React...)

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[1]: That is, press a number and then [Enter]. This, I later (after some rudimentary hints on DOS from a classmate) found out, called the batch files 1.BAT, 2.BAT, etc, which in turn set up whatever needed to be set up and then started the respective application.

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