Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won’t kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.
It’s like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that’s becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.
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.
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.
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a tablet and has no idea why anyone owns a computer - they’re thinking “Computers are dumb, because they’re just large outdated clunky looking tablets”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.
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.
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.
Where are all the people that grew up with MS-DOS and had to edit their autoexec.bat files to install a TSR? Why is it such a big deal now but somehow everybody was okay with it 30 years ago? It won’t kill people to learn a bit about how their computer works.
It’s like owning a car but not even knowing where the windshield wiper fluid goes. And that’s becoming a thing too, sadly. Might as well lock the hood and only let the dealer in, that seems to be what people want nowadays.
There’s a guy at work proudly reminiscing about how we had to fuck around with autoexec.bat and config.sys back in the day to get things to work
But refuses to use linux because CLI…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.