“oh, you know so much! howd you do that?”

“grandma, i literally only typed dir.”

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    13 hours ago

    The whole “old people are bad at tech” thing is a bit long in the tooth now. Many people who grew up with computers are now old, and many young people are just as baffled by the command line as any grandmother.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      13 hours ago

      There really was a magic learning window 1990-2010, I think. Some people who were there are still bad at technology, and a select few from before are good at it and maybe even helped build those systems, but the prevalence is night and day.

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        13 hours ago

        Yes but I’d say it started 10 years before that, growing in numbers through the first few years of the 1980s.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          9 hours ago

          That could be, it was a rough period. I wasn’t around for the beginning, and even the end was approximate as locked down mobile OSs and similarly user-opaque systems gradually came to dominate.

          Kids today can still learn computers, but they have to explicitly try. I think something analogous happened with early cars. The first guys had to be able to personally maintain and repair the whole thing, and then over time it gradually became an area for experts and the odd enthusiast only.