• moody
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    4 hours ago

    Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS

    People for the most part haven’t had to deal with the command line since Windows 95 was released, and that was 30 years ago. Which means anyone old enough to had regularly used DOS is at least in their 40’s now.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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      4 hours ago

      Right, and cars got pushbutton ignition, backup cameras, lane sensors, and front end collision warnings. That doesn’t mean people should stop learning how to change a tire. I blame schools for not keeping kids technologically literate in a world where computers run our entire lives.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Somewhere a Gen-Z or Gen Alpha is reading this on a tablet and has no idea why anyone owns a computer - they’re thinking “Computers are dumb, because they’re just large outdated clunky looking tablets”

        …and somewhere in the past there was probably an old man, angry at the fact that modern keyboards will never match the elegance and typing skills found by using a type writer. Lamenting that people have lost their mechanical understanding of things because they’ve never had to replace a ribbon when it’s lost its ability to pick up or put down ink as it should.

        You’re standing between these two arguments (thinking you’re correct)… when the arguments (and ones like them) stretch all the way back in time to the first technoologies, and all the way forwards into the future, to the last of them, or as far as the mind can see.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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          1 hour ago

          Behind the pretty UIs, computers and tablets are still computers, with CPUs running machine code residing in memory. Nothing has fundamentally changed since the 60s. Somebody has to continue to understand how it all works behind the scenes to move us forward, or we’ll have the movie “Idiocracy” coming true, and we’ll all stagnate as a species while an AI tries its best to manage us and keep us alive.

          In your analogy, it would be as if we’re all still using mechanical typewriters, but have created an automaton with a pretty face to talk to which pushes the keys and changes the ribbon behind a curtain. The typewriter is still there.

      • moody
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        4 hours ago

        Sounds to me like you’d be shocked at the number of people who couldn’t manage to change a tire on their own if their life depended on it.

        You can blame whoever you want, but frankly, most people just don’t care to learn anything unless they’re already interested in it. There are tons of people who take their car to a mechanic for the most mundane shit. They’ll call in the Geek Squad when they have a PC problem. They have no interest in learning how their stuff works because there’s always someone else they can pay to handle that.