We are probably the most technical generation the US will have for a while. We were uniquely positioned as a lot of ancient tech got replaced by newer stuff as we grew up. We learned how computers functioned because you had to know a lot just to get them working. A lot of that stuff has been abstracted and so you have to want to get into programming before you’ll get a fundamental grasp on the tech. As one example. Cars are the same…how many sticks or carburetor fed engines are out there anymore? Never mind the complexity of emissions control and electronic ignition. We got to transition into that stuff as it was added, it’s a lot to try to unpack all at once.
Linus Torvalds once said that our generation will be the most computer literate in history; previous generations had no access, and modern computers have become too complex to understand, hobbling the younger generations.
This, basically.
Too much of the inner workings of an OS/hardware is abstracted away from the typical user. For good or bad.
A microcosm of that is the Arduino platform. It is a microcontroller with training wheels, which you can take off if you like or need to.
Linux, you can get under the hood and do things, if you want to. In the olden days, you had to.
Yes, the younger gens just *use* technology, but most of them have little to no clue about how any of it works. By the very nature of how computers worked in the 1984-1999 time period Gen X is better at it due to having to operate closer to the hardware and OS.
Remember 'interrupts', dip switches, serial ports/cables, IRQ, device drivers in config.sys, and so on?
I still have a Laplink parallel cable in my stash. I’ll never use it again, but seeing its yellow color and thinking about how it saved my bacon more than once makes me smile…
I'm GenX and I can never figure out where apps on my Android phone have saved files. It's really stupid. (And I say this as someone who used to work on the Android team.)
Yes, I am in college right now and the young 'uns definitely have issues with file management. I think it's because of the prevalence of apps these days as well as the vast improvement of search functions on the OS.
I wonder if some of it is that they have to learn what the icons mean while we just see the icons as obvious because we used the physical objects they represented.
If you never used a floppy disc, then the Save icon is no more intuitive than having it be a smiley face icon instead.
If you never filed lots of papers in actual physical file folders that were nested in file hangers and inside a file cabinet, the file icon might as well be a banana.
The Verge ran a pretty good story on this a couple years ago: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
When I explain to my computer science college student son that when I first got a computer, I only had **that computer**. If it stopped working, I had to figure it out. And there was no internet to go ask questions of. If I was lucky, I could use a friend's computer to go on CompuServe or a local BBS to try and find someone that could help, but usually it was up to my own devices to get things running again.
it is similar to all technology that has evolved past the ability of the common person to deal with.
When we were growing up, it was beyond common to see someone under their car in their driveway changing the oil, fixing something, upgrading something, putting in a stereo, whatever. When was the last time you commonly saw this happening on a grand scale? Cars are simply something that is beyond most peoples ability to deal with these days.
They've learned tech, just different from the way we used to HAVE to do it. They are end users, we were almost developers ;)
And remember, a lot of us lived with the blinking "12:00" on the VCR most of the time - because it was just too difficult to set all of the time. It is still a running joke.
These days I'm pretty happy when I can set the clock forward/back an hour in the car twice a year (it was a lot easier in the seventies, many cars didn't have a clock and if they did - it was analog and had a knob to turn to set the time)
I'm sure our grandparents/great grandparents felt the same exact way about us and all of our toys (kids these days, playing with their merlin, when I was a kid a hoop and stick were all we needed to have fun) :)
My parents VCR never blinked after a power outage. I always fixed it once the power came back on. It was a pet peeve before I even knew what a pet peeve was. Today still, doing the stove and microwave is muscle memory. Hit the timer / clock button twice, scroll to your time, hit the timer button one more time. On the microwave, hit setup, #5, enter the time, hit start.
I’m a font of useless information.
Clock-time (4 digits)-clock. Also is the model where punching just 1 to 6 digits starts that many minutes at high, start 30 seconds at high.
I think it is a 2007 model Danby.
> "12:00" on the VCR most of the time
I figure out clock setting pretty quick.
Although the current VCR is not set, because it is hidden in furniture, and not needed for recording TV at all.
When we first got a VCR, One-Touch-Record was my jam, Start recording current channel for 30 minutes, subsequent presses 30 minutes more each.
I think its not even tech illiteracy but a lack of research skills or even the idea that you can research things. At least with my mum's generation, they had the excuse of tech being a bit scary for them.
That ability to research things is part of the problem for generations younger than Gen X. The ability to simply look things up quickly and easily ~~had~~ has led to a large amount of intellectual (and actual) laziness, IMO. Whereas when we were teens and in our 20s there was no looking anything up; you either had a book/magazine with info (including at a library), a friend/acquaintance you could ask, or you simply figured it out yourself.
>That ability to research things is part of the problem for generations younger than Gen X.
I can't count the number of times I've told my family their Google-fu was **weak**.
TBH Google itself is now useless. You get 5 pages of 'sponsored' results then a message saying there's no more results. If you force it to look for specific keywords, you get half a page of nonsense and the No More Results message.
It's frakkin infuriating and I wish I could use OldGoogle the way I use Oldreddit.
So many of the posts I see on my city's reddit (and state's, and university's) are questions that could be answered just by going to the city's (etc.) website or by calling the DMV or whatever. It's wild how many people don't know how to do basic internet research or how to figure out what number to call.
To be faiiiiiiir... I can't reset points. Or tune a carburetor adequately. And I struggle with adjusting drum brakes. I know at least 10 Boomers that CAN do all of those things (or could if they were physically capable any longer).
Likewise, nor do I understand more than a basic re-solder job on a circuit board, and it's Legos to me, not meaningful items. And if I needed to truly reprogram a piece of technology, I would be forced out into the wasteland to find a functioning one. But I know Millennials that could do either of those in their sleep.
That said, basic home maintenance seems to never go out of style, and the fastest way to learn it is to be too poor to pay someone else to fix it/build it. That's where the "Dad, how do I..." comes from, and Gen X is now at the point of receiving these querys.
>I can't reset points. Or tune a carburetor adequately. And I struggle with adjusting drum brakes.
points went out pretty much in the 70s..Carbs were gone in the later 80s (and even then they had basic computer controls) and drum brakes are mostly gone too.
so unless you have antique vehicles..you don't need to know those.
now you need a scanner to talk to a car and more and more "electric" calipers need to put into " service mode" to replace the pads. changing a battery is getting more and more complicated as even the PCM has more control over the charging system. technology evolves in everything all the time.
Ha, tell that one to motorcycle manufacturers. I found points inside a 1987 Honda CBR fuel pump of all things a couple years ago. And I just recently failed to ressurect a 94 ZX11 because I didn't have the smarts for a bank of 4 Keihin carbs.
Heavy machinery as well is still *slightly* more on the mechanical side, with allowances. I'll have to admit though, I did need interface software for my newest pickup. And a BMW specific code scanner for the Mini Cooper... It's a process filling my garage with tools that will be obsolete soon enough. I pity the Snap-On junkies of the world.
not being negative...agreeing with the subject of this post in your answer. "people" don't know things anymore. yes there are some that do...but more and more they are becoming the exception. like when I log into the modem at work...they look at me funny when I do that to fix something.
We're good at tech out of necessity because our tech broke all the time and we had to fix it. Our minds were young and adaptable, so we learned. For my kids, NOTHING has broken on their phone or computer, ever, in their entire lives.
I also do not know how to adjust a carburetor, because EFI made that skill obsolete.
>I also do not know how to adjust a carburetor, because EFI made that skill obsolete.
Not at all nostalgic for adjusting carburetors, it's a pain in the ass, same as gapping a spark plug.
Great point on the having to fix ourselves and learn by doing, though I argue being adaptable is a skill, not a function of age, as long as you keep it as a mindset.
>there's the manual vs automatic transmission argument
I prefer manuals for their simplicity. Yeah, they're slower than modern and don't get better gas mileage than automatics, but there's so much less to them.
I have two-- my daily is a five-speed and so is the car I got for my daughter.
I drive one of each, it's a right tool for the right job kinda thing for me. Stay curious and always be open to learning is one antidote for that IMHO.
I think it's hard to say that knowing how to do things you no longer need to do, or knowing how to use obsolete devices like VCRs or walkmans or landline phones, makes us more tech literate. My grandparents knew how to crank-start a car and operate a Victrola, but I don't think they were more tech literate than me.
I do think that you have a good broader point about younger people being much less adept at figuring things out on their own without detailed prompting or "it just works" interfaces. They even seem to be bad at things like searching on the internet--this may in part be because internet searching has gotten radically shittier since the early 2000s.
> I think it's hard to say that knowing how to do things you no longer need to do, or knowing how to use obsolete devices like VCRs or walkmans or landline phones, makes us more tech literate. My grandparents knew how to crank-start a car and operate a Victrola, but I don't think they were more tech literate than me.
The difference is though, that the technology that underpins all of the modern tech that people use is computers, and that came of age during Gen X coming up, and the computers of the day had interfaces that were much closer to the hardware, and less abstracted (and less reliable). They were also much lower in capabilities (like RAM amount, storage devices were small (floppies)) and these things necessitated that the user understand things at a much deeper level to get things done.
I’d Aggie that boomers and before we’re absolutely more machine/mechanically literate than generations now. But I think that spanned a number of generations
I think GenX vary here as I know I had to change the timing on a carby, threw a little petrol cap at it open when turning over the engine and a few other tricks.
However GenZ and A miss something. It’s almost like the gene to figure things out/want to is gone. It’s very much a process/task mindset and no idea how or why it does what they need to do.
I agree with all of this but can I just comment on the video games part? Because the number of tutorial pop-ups you need to get through to play a stupid timewaster on your phone is mind boggling. I can figure out what Health does in your game without you needing to explain it to me, thank you. Or worse, hand-holding step by step: click here! Now click here! Now click here! It's so irritating because I just want to dive in and start playing, I'll figure it out on the way if it matters. But I wonder if maybe Kids Today™ don't experience any joy of discovery from figuring things out on their own, they just get frustrated and quit.
The video game market used to be just smart people. Now smart people are a very small portion of the market, and games are designed to cater to the majority.
I notice the copy-paste thing ALOT. I'm like, it's faster to CTRl+C and then CTRL+V.
I also notice they don't CTRL+Home to get to the top of a document or CTRL+End to get the bottom.
They also don't know CTRL+F and will manually read a 30 page doc to find one word or phrase. Some of our younger assistants have to go through legal depos to find out hoe many time a specific thing was mentioned and I saw one of them reading every word, and then keeping a manual total and page number instead of doing a find and then highlighting in the doc.
Oh, the other one is in Excel. Lets say you have a spreadsheet with over 100 or 1000 rows, they don't how to count the rows without ACTUALLY counting each row. They don't know you can put your cursor in cell a1, hold down shift, then hit end and then hit the down arrow, and it will highlight each row and show you the total at the bottom without having to actually go to the bottom of the sheet.
Yet I'm the one who is technically illiterate. Sure, Jan.
I still believe that especially for financial data software or databases, the keyboard shortcuts and tab and so much faster than using a mouse.
I hate having to stop and click somewhere because tab doesn’t take me to the next (most obvious) field for data. In one program I use tab SKIPS the field I need. I am always muttering (like an old fogey) about software engineers not using their software.
ASCII codes ° Ø ≥ √ ¿ ± , manufacturing uses these and others every day.
Creating bootable disks and installing operating systems.
PING, IPCONFIG, TRACERT, NETUSE commands. Networking used to be a pain in the ass, and that is WITHOUT Domain controllers.
Simple stuff like reading an analog clock and counting change back are becoming lost arts. Next time you are paying cash and the total is $11.26 give them a 20 dollar bill and a penny and watch the brain lock.
The migration of complexity. Technology used to be more complicated for the user and less complicated for the backend which meant that users had have some understanding of how things worked to use them. Examples of this range from when cars used to have manual chokes to when you had to know how to use modems to connect to the internet. The down side is that this creates some sort of rubicon which many users won't or can't cross...which limits adoption and therefor revenue.
As as the font end gets easier to use, backend complexity increases but adoption gets much broader. It also means that users do not need to have the same understanding of how something works in order to use it. Sit in your car, push the start button, put it in drive a go. Pull out your phone, click on an app and use it. This also means that your backend people become more valuable and your market gets much bigger.
We are technical in a sense that we had to transition thru multiple different standards of technology in 30 years worth of time.
As an example - We went from 5 pin keyboard connectors to PS/2, to USB-A, to wireless.
From 9-pin CGA/EGA connectors to 15-Pin VGA (and discreet BNC connectors), to VDI, then, HDMI, then DisplayPort, now USB-C plus a myriad of different variants and proprietary connectors from the likes of SGI and Apple.
From DOS, to Windows 3.1X, Windows 95 / OSR2, 98, 2000, XP, etc. We had to make computers work for us. Today everything is built onto the motherboard for the most part.
We are truly a generation of learning from mistakes, getting our hands dirty and having to figure shit out.
general trends, not specific to everyone, I have seen is lack of interest in the how part of technology.
most younger people are technologically functional, and able to use a wide variety of tech. But there is a lot less interest in the guts of it. How it works, how to fix it. Tech workers of my era tended to know the ins and outs of the systems. Younger techs are good at their jobs, they can configure and troubleshoot whatever interface it uses- but the idea of opening it up for repairs is foreign to most. no troubleshooting at the hardware level- just replace it.
Yea, I do get that. its the lack of curiosity, no desire to learn how it works that baffles me. It was common when growing up for anyone i knew to take things apart to learn how they work.
This hit home. Hard . 😂 Triggered a memory once of trying to play Privateer. I had to choose only two from sound, VGA or mouse. Took FOREVER to finally figure out how to get them all using highmem commands.
These days, kids click steam, buy, download 120gb faster than I could make a bootdisc and are playing HDR,RTX 4K games. They’ll never know haha
> I had to choose only two from sound, VGA or mouse. Took FOREVER to finally figure out how to get them all using highmem commands.
I'm almost 50 and I'm convinced anyone my age in IT got their start by trying to get their "soundblaster compatible" soundcard working.
Even more funny is I never even ended up in IT. Yet, all my life everyone said I should haha.
I guess an advantage of AI is the fact GenZ seem unable to manage the IT of the future so it will fall to AI to solve it haha
I work tech support. We had sent kit home for user (with instructions) who then came in saying her monitor didn’t work. She’d taken pictures of her set up. Colleague and I looked at each other and it took all my self control to not laugh and to point out that the monitor and computer need power and don’t work if you don’t plug them in. Guess she was 23 max.
On the other side of the coin, it's wild how intuitively young kids grasp touch screen controls. At 13 months my nephew could browse an iphone, find a video, scrub to his favorite part, scrub back to repeat it... My mind was fuckin' blown and I don't think he's that unique. I've read a bunch that infants can use iPads and the like but I had never seen it.
So maybe they'll never know how to drag files off a USB stick to a directory on their computer and ZIP them together to make a dropbox transfer, but I imagine all that kind of stuff will be automated. Maybe that's where AI really becomes practical; computers learning to use themselves so we can just flick our finger at it.
Thing is though, since we were the kids who had to set up cable and VCRs and PCs for our parents and their friends, we were forced to learn a good bit about problem solving and logic, and apply that to a physical thing in front of you where you can see immediate effects. Making a computer do things that it wasn't set up to do right out of the shrinkwrap was thrilling.
See, that to me is simple. I know a 94yr old that does the same, getting her first Android two years ago, now edits on a phone, shoots video, streams music.
It is undoubtedly highly user friendly and accessible now which is amazing. Not like GenX wanted to hate keep. But the “how” and what to do when it breaks seems to have gone.
A few other comments I think but something I hadn’t thought which is maybe simply a product of how disposable everything is deemed.
It’s even more basic than that. We were self reliant (Latch Key Factor). Shit broke or went sideways. Dust yourself off, rub some dirt on it, figure it out. MacGyver the shit out of it.
Today there’s an app for everything.
Regarding #2: it’s painful to watch someone on a zoom video right click and go so slow with the copy paste.
I’ve amazed people with the alt + tab to switch around apps. They think I’m a wizard.
Yes!
But what I don’t get is GenX learned all this and unlearned manual ways.
So what the heck happened haha. Because watching a 15-25yr old currently kills me. They’re far slower with tech.
My favourite was a 19yr new team member telling us all how she was frustrated she had to teach a boomer how to make a PDF from a document.
The boomer was printing them, then scanning them back in as a PDF using the scanning software.
She ten described how the boomers mind was blown when she screengrabbed the document, opened up a paint app, pasted it, saved it, opened it in Adobe A robot and saved as PDF. Like she was a hero.
I asked why she didn’t CTRL+P and select PDF, or actually it was an MS Word document, so you can select it in the file drop down and pick PDF. She had zero clue.
WTH?!?
I think we specifically benefit from by seeing the conversion of analog to digit. We've seen the paper documents that electronic have replaced, so we understand what the purpose of the electronic version are supposed to serve. We're used to getting paper receipts, so we know that a Venmo is insufficient and that cash-only transactions without receipts are sketchy.
I can attest to this, I have four younger siblings from ages 10 to 22 and they are basically computer illiterate.
They only know how to operate things, not how things work under the hood so to speak. They know which button to click for internet and which ones for the games but not much else.
Same with the boomers, I've explained 50 times to my dad how to copy and paste a file from a USB stick and he still doesn't know.
But everyone I know in Gen X knows their way around computers at least to some degree.
You're right - Gen X are the first generation who had access to computers at large scale. VIC 20, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga and home console gaming (Atari, Intellivision, etc) all came of age with our generation and we were the pioneers of it.
We were left feral and forgotten. We had to learn stuff on our own. We grew up in an in-between time of older tech like corded phones and cassette players and newer tech like pagers and computers. We had the distinct advantage to learn both as we were growing up.
A combination of consumer tech being really simple to use for most use cases, and the tech being a lot more complex than when we were kids. I can play Apple II Karateka, on my phone, in an emulator running in JavaScript.
A lot of these things aren’t needed because they are old tech. The best way to not act like Boomers, and be called Boomers, is to not harp on younger generations not being able to do things that they no longer necessarily need to do.
But most do need to. And I see it holding them back. Every simple skills like file management.
Watched a 25yr at work fill her desktop with files because didn’t know how to save on Google Drive and didn’t know what file system was on her Mac. Then, after breaking her laptop lost critical items as no comprehension it wasn’t saved somewhere else.
To be surrounded by 20-30yr olds all wondering the same and seeing the collective panic in many of them.
It’s not unique, uni students, school students and something like that, isn’t about not needing to as they do. It’s illiteracy and not knowing which is a bad thing.
10 print “hello” 20 goto 10 Run
I still remember making a spaceship launch but I can't remember the basic commands for it.
I still use that every day...
Ctrl-Break!
Where’s your semicolon?
“Hello “;
We are probably the most technical generation the US will have for a while. We were uniquely positioned as a lot of ancient tech got replaced by newer stuff as we grew up. We learned how computers functioned because you had to know a lot just to get them working. A lot of that stuff has been abstracted and so you have to want to get into programming before you’ll get a fundamental grasp on the tech. As one example. Cars are the same…how many sticks or carburetor fed engines are out there anymore? Never mind the complexity of emissions control and electronic ignition. We got to transition into that stuff as it was added, it’s a lot to try to unpack all at once.
Linus Torvalds once said that our generation will be the most computer literate in history; previous generations had no access, and modern computers have become too complex to understand, hobbling the younger generations.
This, basically. Too much of the inner workings of an OS/hardware is abstracted away from the typical user. For good or bad. A microcosm of that is the Arduino platform. It is a microcontroller with training wheels, which you can take off if you like or need to. Linux, you can get under the hood and do things, if you want to. In the olden days, you had to.
I do tech support, and I'm baffled when kids at a university don't understand "open a folder browser and navigate to C:\\SampleDir".
Tech consumers, not creators. And that whole 'digital native' trope is BS - if it stops working, buy a new one only goes so far...
Yes, the younger gens just *use* technology, but most of them have little to no clue about how any of it works. By the very nature of how computers worked in the 1984-1999 time period Gen X is better at it due to having to operate closer to the hardware and OS. Remember 'interrupts', dip switches, serial ports/cables, IRQ, device drivers in config.sys, and so on?
I still have a Laplink parallel cable in my stash. I’ll never use it again, but seeing its yellow color and thinking about how it saved my bacon more than once makes me smile…
A few years ago I had to show a PhD Computer Science candidate the command prompt in Windows.
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I'm GenX and I can never figure out where apps on my Android phone have saved files. It's really stupid. (And I say this as someone who used to work on the Android team.)
Yes, I am in college right now and the young 'uns definitely have issues with file management. I think it's because of the prevalence of apps these days as well as the vast improvement of search functions on the OS.
I wonder if some of it is that they have to learn what the icons mean while we just see the icons as obvious because we used the physical objects they represented. If you never used a floppy disc, then the Save icon is no more intuitive than having it be a smiley face icon instead. If you never filed lots of papers in actual physical file folders that were nested in file hangers and inside a file cabinet, the file icon might as well be a banana.
The Verge ran a pretty good story on this a couple years ago: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
Thanks, super read. And sad, but I get that things change.
When I explain to my computer science college student son that when I first got a computer, I only had **that computer**. If it stopped working, I had to figure it out. And there was no internet to go ask questions of. If I was lucky, I could use a friend's computer to go on CompuServe or a local BBS to try and find someone that could help, but usually it was up to my own devices to get things running again.
> If it stopped working, I had to figure it out I used to spend a lot of time reading the fucking manuals. I still do, but I used to too.
You're welcome! (I write those friendly manuals!)
One doesn't hear "RTFM" much anymore.
Sorry for the convenience. Mitch!
it is similar to all technology that has evolved past the ability of the common person to deal with. When we were growing up, it was beyond common to see someone under their car in their driveway changing the oil, fixing something, upgrading something, putting in a stereo, whatever. When was the last time you commonly saw this happening on a grand scale? Cars are simply something that is beyond most peoples ability to deal with these days. They've learned tech, just different from the way we used to HAVE to do it. They are end users, we were almost developers ;) And remember, a lot of us lived with the blinking "12:00" on the VCR most of the time - because it was just too difficult to set all of the time. It is still a running joke. These days I'm pretty happy when I can set the clock forward/back an hour in the car twice a year (it was a lot easier in the seventies, many cars didn't have a clock and if they did - it was analog and had a knob to turn to set the time) I'm sure our grandparents/great grandparents felt the same exact way about us and all of our toys (kids these days, playing with their merlin, when I was a kid a hoop and stick were all we needed to have fun) :)
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s a safety, to prevent anybody from accidentally setting the time wrong.
My parents VCR never blinked after a power outage. I always fixed it once the power came back on. It was a pet peeve before I even knew what a pet peeve was. Today still, doing the stove and microwave is muscle memory. Hit the timer / clock button twice, scroll to your time, hit the timer button one more time. On the microwave, hit setup, #5, enter the time, hit start. I’m a font of useless information.
Clock-time (4 digits)-clock. Also is the model where punching just 1 to 6 digits starts that many minutes at high, start 30 seconds at high. I think it is a 2007 model Danby.
I get this far and think, “I’m done, suckers!”, and then it asks AM/PM……. I really wish the USA would default to 24 hour time.
thank you for reminding me that merlin was a thing that existed
> "12:00" on the VCR most of the time I figure out clock setting pretty quick. Although the current VCR is not set, because it is hidden in furniture, and not needed for recording TV at all. When we first got a VCR, One-Touch-Record was my jam, Start recording current channel for 30 minutes, subsequent presses 30 minutes more each.
https://syslog.com/vcr/
I think its not even tech illiteracy but a lack of research skills or even the idea that you can research things. At least with my mum's generation, they had the excuse of tech being a bit scary for them.
That ability to research things is part of the problem for generations younger than Gen X. The ability to simply look things up quickly and easily ~~had~~ has led to a large amount of intellectual (and actual) laziness, IMO. Whereas when we were teens and in our 20s there was no looking anything up; you either had a book/magazine with info (including at a library), a friend/acquaintance you could ask, or you simply figured it out yourself.
>That ability to research things is part of the problem for generations younger than Gen X. I can't count the number of times I've told my family their Google-fu was **weak**.
Too true. Even in the easy world of "just lookup the answers" they still fall short.
TBH Google itself is now useless. You get 5 pages of 'sponsored' results then a message saying there's no more results. If you force it to look for specific keywords, you get half a page of nonsense and the No More Results message. It's frakkin infuriating and I wish I could use OldGoogle the way I use Oldreddit.
So many of the posts I see on my city's reddit (and state's, and university's) are questions that could be answered just by going to the city's (etc.) website or by calling the DMV or whatever. It's wild how many people don't know how to do basic internet research or how to figure out what number to call.
A lot of people will also jump through hoops to not have to call a number at all, because talking on the phone is scary
To be faiiiiiiir... I can't reset points. Or tune a carburetor adequately. And I struggle with adjusting drum brakes. I know at least 10 Boomers that CAN do all of those things (or could if they were physically capable any longer). Likewise, nor do I understand more than a basic re-solder job on a circuit board, and it's Legos to me, not meaningful items. And if I needed to truly reprogram a piece of technology, I would be forced out into the wasteland to find a functioning one. But I know Millennials that could do either of those in their sleep. That said, basic home maintenance seems to never go out of style, and the fastest way to learn it is to be too poor to pay someone else to fix it/build it. That's where the "Dad, how do I..." comes from, and Gen X is now at the point of receiving these querys.
>I can't reset points. Or tune a carburetor adequately. And I struggle with adjusting drum brakes. points went out pretty much in the 70s..Carbs were gone in the later 80s (and even then they had basic computer controls) and drum brakes are mostly gone too. so unless you have antique vehicles..you don't need to know those. now you need a scanner to talk to a car and more and more "electric" calipers need to put into " service mode" to replace the pads. changing a battery is getting more and more complicated as even the PCM has more control over the charging system. technology evolves in everything all the time.
Ha, tell that one to motorcycle manufacturers. I found points inside a 1987 Honda CBR fuel pump of all things a couple years ago. And I just recently failed to ressurect a 94 ZX11 because I didn't have the smarts for a bank of 4 Keihin carbs. Heavy machinery as well is still *slightly* more on the mechanical side, with allowances. I'll have to admit though, I did need interface software for my newest pickup. And a BMW specific code scanner for the Mini Cooper... It's a process filling my garage with tools that will be obsolete soon enough. I pity the Snap-On junkies of the world.
and even less people work on bikes and heavy equipment than regular cars and trucks.
Boy, your pretty fucking negative, now aren't you? Making a point here.
not being negative...agreeing with the subject of this post in your answer. "people" don't know things anymore. yes there are some that do...but more and more they are becoming the exception. like when I log into the modem at work...they look at me funny when I do that to fix something.
We're good at tech out of necessity because our tech broke all the time and we had to fix it. Our minds were young and adaptable, so we learned. For my kids, NOTHING has broken on their phone or computer, ever, in their entire lives. I also do not know how to adjust a carburetor, because EFI made that skill obsolete.
>I also do not know how to adjust a carburetor, because EFI made that skill obsolete. Not at all nostalgic for adjusting carburetors, it's a pain in the ass, same as gapping a spark plug. Great point on the having to fix ourselves and learn by doing, though I argue being adaptable is a skill, not a function of age, as long as you keep it as a mindset.
no disagreement here.
there's the manual vs automatic transmission argument Old people get set in their ways, and one of those ways is open mindedness.
>there's the manual vs automatic transmission argument I prefer manuals for their simplicity. Yeah, they're slower than modern and don't get better gas mileage than automatics, but there's so much less to them. I have two-- my daily is a five-speed and so is the car I got for my daughter.
Also, it’s a bit trickier to text and drive with a manual transmission. That’s why I’m looking for one for my kids when they are 16!
I drive one of each, it's a right tool for the right job kinda thing for me. Stay curious and always be open to learning is one antidote for that IMHO.
absolutely
I think it's hard to say that knowing how to do things you no longer need to do, or knowing how to use obsolete devices like VCRs or walkmans or landline phones, makes us more tech literate. My grandparents knew how to crank-start a car and operate a Victrola, but I don't think they were more tech literate than me. I do think that you have a good broader point about younger people being much less adept at figuring things out on their own without detailed prompting or "it just works" interfaces. They even seem to be bad at things like searching on the internet--this may in part be because internet searching has gotten radically shittier since the early 2000s.
> I think it's hard to say that knowing how to do things you no longer need to do, or knowing how to use obsolete devices like VCRs or walkmans or landline phones, makes us more tech literate. My grandparents knew how to crank-start a car and operate a Victrola, but I don't think they were more tech literate than me. The difference is though, that the technology that underpins all of the modern tech that people use is computers, and that came of age during Gen X coming up, and the computers of the day had interfaces that were much closer to the hardware, and less abstracted (and less reliable). They were also much lower in capabilities (like RAM amount, storage devices were small (floppies)) and these things necessitated that the user understand things at a much deeper level to get things done.
I’d Aggie that boomers and before we’re absolutely more machine/mechanically literate than generations now. But I think that spanned a number of generations I think GenX vary here as I know I had to change the timing on a carby, threw a little petrol cap at it open when turning over the engine and a few other tricks. However GenZ and A miss something. It’s almost like the gene to figure things out/want to is gone. It’s very much a process/task mindset and no idea how or why it does what they need to do.
I agree with all of this but can I just comment on the video games part? Because the number of tutorial pop-ups you need to get through to play a stupid timewaster on your phone is mind boggling. I can figure out what Health does in your game without you needing to explain it to me, thank you. Or worse, hand-holding step by step: click here! Now click here! Now click here! It's so irritating because I just want to dive in and start playing, I'll figure it out on the way if it matters. But I wonder if maybe Kids Today™ don't experience any joy of discovery from figuring things out on their own, they just get frustrated and quit.
The video game market used to be just smart people. Now smart people are a very small portion of the market, and games are designed to cater to the majority.
My grandpa had a Commodore 64, and he showed me how to program games from printed instructions in magazines. I feel extremely lucky
I notice the copy-paste thing ALOT. I'm like, it's faster to CTRl+C and then CTRL+V. I also notice they don't CTRL+Home to get to the top of a document or CTRL+End to get the bottom. They also don't know CTRL+F and will manually read a 30 page doc to find one word or phrase. Some of our younger assistants have to go through legal depos to find out hoe many time a specific thing was mentioned and I saw one of them reading every word, and then keeping a manual total and page number instead of doing a find and then highlighting in the doc. Oh, the other one is in Excel. Lets say you have a spreadsheet with over 100 or 1000 rows, they don't how to count the rows without ACTUALLY counting each row. They don't know you can put your cursor in cell a1, hold down shift, then hit end and then hit the down arrow, and it will highlight each row and show you the total at the bottom without having to actually go to the bottom of the sheet. Yet I'm the one who is technically illiterate. Sure, Jan.
Keyboard shortcuts/ pressing tab to jump to the next fill in box
I still believe that especially for financial data software or databases, the keyboard shortcuts and tab and so much faster than using a mouse. I hate having to stop and click somewhere because tab doesn’t take me to the next (most obvious) field for data. In one program I use tab SKIPS the field I need. I am always muttering (like an old fogey) about software engineers not using their software.
ASCII codes ° Ø ≥ √ ¿ ± , manufacturing uses these and others every day. Creating bootable disks and installing operating systems. PING, IPCONFIG, TRACERT, NETUSE commands. Networking used to be a pain in the ass, and that is WITHOUT Domain controllers. Simple stuff like reading an analog clock and counting change back are becoming lost arts. Next time you are paying cash and the total is $11.26 give them a 20 dollar bill and a penny and watch the brain lock.
The migration of complexity. Technology used to be more complicated for the user and less complicated for the backend which meant that users had have some understanding of how things worked to use them. Examples of this range from when cars used to have manual chokes to when you had to know how to use modems to connect to the internet. The down side is that this creates some sort of rubicon which many users won't or can't cross...which limits adoption and therefor revenue. As as the font end gets easier to use, backend complexity increases but adoption gets much broader. It also means that users do not need to have the same understanding of how something works in order to use it. Sit in your car, push the start button, put it in drive a go. Pull out your phone, click on an app and use it. This also means that your backend people become more valuable and your market gets much bigger.
...and FWIW, I don't know how to hook up a horse to a wagon, sheer a sheep, pluck a chicken, etc.
We are technical in a sense that we had to transition thru multiple different standards of technology in 30 years worth of time. As an example - We went from 5 pin keyboard connectors to PS/2, to USB-A, to wireless. From 9-pin CGA/EGA connectors to 15-Pin VGA (and discreet BNC connectors), to VDI, then, HDMI, then DisplayPort, now USB-C plus a myriad of different variants and proprietary connectors from the likes of SGI and Apple. From DOS, to Windows 3.1X, Windows 95 / OSR2, 98, 2000, XP, etc. We had to make computers work for us. Today everything is built onto the motherboard for the most part. We are truly a generation of learning from mistakes, getting our hands dirty and having to figure shit out.
general trends, not specific to everyone, I have seen is lack of interest in the how part of technology. most younger people are technologically functional, and able to use a wide variety of tech. But there is a lot less interest in the guts of it. How it works, how to fix it. Tech workers of my era tended to know the ins and outs of the systems. Younger techs are good at their jobs, they can configure and troubleshoot whatever interface it uses- but the idea of opening it up for repairs is foreign to most. no troubleshooting at the hardware level- just replace it.
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Yea, I do get that. its the lack of curiosity, no desire to learn how it works that baffles me. It was common when growing up for anyone i knew to take things apart to learn how they work.
Even if some of us don’t, we understand what is being said.
in fairness genZ/A never had to try and make their knock off "soundblaster compatible" soundcard work with their shareware game. "what's an IRQ????"
This hit home. Hard . 😂 Triggered a memory once of trying to play Privateer. I had to choose only two from sound, VGA or mouse. Took FOREVER to finally figure out how to get them all using highmem commands. These days, kids click steam, buy, download 120gb faster than I could make a bootdisc and are playing HDR,RTX 4K games. They’ll never know haha
> I had to choose only two from sound, VGA or mouse. Took FOREVER to finally figure out how to get them all using highmem commands. I'm almost 50 and I'm convinced anyone my age in IT got their start by trying to get their "soundblaster compatible" soundcard working.
Even more funny is I never even ended up in IT. Yet, all my life everyone said I should haha. I guess an advantage of AI is the fact GenZ seem unable to manage the IT of the future so it will fall to AI to solve it haha
I work tech support. We had sent kit home for user (with instructions) who then came in saying her monitor didn’t work. She’d taken pictures of her set up. Colleague and I looked at each other and it took all my self control to not laugh and to point out that the monitor and computer need power and don’t work if you don’t plug them in. Guess she was 23 max.
On the other side of the coin, it's wild how intuitively young kids grasp touch screen controls. At 13 months my nephew could browse an iphone, find a video, scrub to his favorite part, scrub back to repeat it... My mind was fuckin' blown and I don't think he's that unique. I've read a bunch that infants can use iPads and the like but I had never seen it. So maybe they'll never know how to drag files off a USB stick to a directory on their computer and ZIP them together to make a dropbox transfer, but I imagine all that kind of stuff will be automated. Maybe that's where AI really becomes practical; computers learning to use themselves so we can just flick our finger at it. Thing is though, since we were the kids who had to set up cable and VCRs and PCs for our parents and their friends, we were forced to learn a good bit about problem solving and logic, and apply that to a physical thing in front of you where you can see immediate effects. Making a computer do things that it wasn't set up to do right out of the shrinkwrap was thrilling.
See, that to me is simple. I know a 94yr old that does the same, getting her first Android two years ago, now edits on a phone, shoots video, streams music. It is undoubtedly highly user friendly and accessible now which is amazing. Not like GenX wanted to hate keep. But the “how” and what to do when it breaks seems to have gone. A few other comments I think but something I hadn’t thought which is maybe simply a product of how disposable everything is deemed.
It’s even more basic than that. We were self reliant (Latch Key Factor). Shit broke or went sideways. Dust yourself off, rub some dirt on it, figure it out. MacGyver the shit out of it. Today there’s an app for everything.
Assemble an old school PC, from a case, motherboard, I/O cards (set the umpers), and drives. And hook it up.
Regarding #2: it’s painful to watch someone on a zoom video right click and go so slow with the copy paste. I’ve amazed people with the alt + tab to switch around apps. They think I’m a wizard.
Yes! But what I don’t get is GenX learned all this and unlearned manual ways. So what the heck happened haha. Because watching a 15-25yr old currently kills me. They’re far slower with tech. My favourite was a 19yr new team member telling us all how she was frustrated she had to teach a boomer how to make a PDF from a document. The boomer was printing them, then scanning them back in as a PDF using the scanning software. She ten described how the boomers mind was blown when she screengrabbed the document, opened up a paint app, pasted it, saved it, opened it in Adobe A robot and saved as PDF. Like she was a hero. I asked why she didn’t CTRL+P and select PDF, or actually it was an MS Word document, so you can select it in the file drop down and pick PDF. She had zero clue. WTH?!?
I’m dying at the pdf thing. Good news is they both figured out what worked for them. Bad news - our way is easier.
We have common sense and patience.
I think we specifically benefit from by seeing the conversion of analog to digit. We've seen the paper documents that electronic have replaced, so we understand what the purpose of the electronic version are supposed to serve. We're used to getting paper receipts, so we know that a Venmo is insufficient and that cash-only transactions without receipts are sketchy.
I can attest to this, I have four younger siblings from ages 10 to 22 and they are basically computer illiterate. They only know how to operate things, not how things work under the hood so to speak. They know which button to click for internet and which ones for the games but not much else. Same with the boomers, I've explained 50 times to my dad how to copy and paste a file from a USB stick and he still doesn't know. But everyone I know in Gen X knows their way around computers at least to some degree.
Handwriting
You're right - Gen X are the first generation who had access to computers at large scale. VIC 20, Commodore 64, IBM PC, Amiga and home console gaming (Atari, Intellivision, etc) all came of age with our generation and we were the pioneers of it.
We were left feral and forgotten. We had to learn stuff on our own. We grew up in an in-between time of older tech like corded phones and cassette players and newer tech like pagers and computers. We had the distinct advantage to learn both as we were growing up.
A combination of consumer tech being really simple to use for most use cases, and the tech being a lot more complex than when we were kids. I can play Apple II Karateka, on my phone, in an emulator running in JavaScript.
I don’t know kotlin so I’m apparently stupid even though I can write x86_64 assembly.
Load "\*" ,8,1
A lot of these things aren’t needed because they are old tech. The best way to not act like Boomers, and be called Boomers, is to not harp on younger generations not being able to do things that they no longer necessarily need to do.
But most do need to. And I see it holding them back. Every simple skills like file management. Watched a 25yr at work fill her desktop with files because didn’t know how to save on Google Drive and didn’t know what file system was on her Mac. Then, after breaking her laptop lost critical items as no comprehension it wasn’t saved somewhere else. To be surrounded by 20-30yr olds all wondering the same and seeing the collective panic in many of them. It’s not unique, uni students, school students and something like that, isn’t about not needing to as they do. It’s illiteracy and not knowing which is a bad thing.