My Dad and I were lamenting this news today. We listened to the show together. And although my Dad spent his career in aircraft maintenance (as an officer in the AF), corporate finance, and now (in semi-retirement) higher education, he is a talented car mechanic who fixed all our cars until I was 5 or 6 and he became too busy at work to do so. He understands cars at an almost intuitive level, and even though I'm a decent mechanic myself, I frequently call him up when I'm wondering what's going on with a car.

And I see several other comments here about people listening to the show together with their fathers, and how their fathers were talented mechanics. It's definitely a generational thing.

So many mechanically-inclined boys who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, including Tom and Ray Magliozzi, were into building and repairing cars, just as many mechanically-inclined boys in the 1970s and 1980s were into building, repairing, and programming computers.

(I do say "boys" because this seems to have been a mostly male gene [correction: gender] phenomenon. Fortunately, I think this may be changing now.)

My Dad gets along well with computers (particularly spreadsheets), but he little understanding of how they work inside.

It makes me wonder if my 4-year-old son or 7-year-old daughter and their friends will be strikingly talented in some new field, like virtual reality or nanotechnology, but will marvel at my knowledge of C and of the inner workings of early computers.