I dont understand your qwerty coment I have never seen a device that could be called a computer that didn’t have one. Unless you go as far back as the “mini computers” and even some of those had them
Not to mention that the computer literacy of the youngest generation will literally never be on par with the youngest millennials. I started using windows OS at like 4 years old on windows 95. My first computer classes in school started when I was like 6. We had years and years of just typing classes on those dummy keyboards that werent even computers. WPM was an actual marketable skill at that time that they wanted to impart on kids.
Basically younger millennials have been cemented as the most technically literate people alive. Most of the younger generation have the same level of computer literacy as boomers and are even worse than most Gen X. Far less capable than even elder millennials.
Nothing is going to catch up the young adults who grew up as IPad kids, because for those of us a bit older we have been exercising actual computer skills basically since we popped out
Z3k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I believe that was in relation to phones–they said they never had to use T9 mode on phones that had only numbers, and went straight to qwerty phones.
Z3k3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks. I knew i was missing something
Stillwater@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Actually, as an elder millennial, I believe we are far more computer literate than young millennials.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
As a 90’s kid, I think we’re roughly on-par.
I grew up with Windows (95, then 98), DOS, MacOS 8, 9, and X, and used several Apple II computers at school. I was able to use dial-up on my own by like 7?
Built my first custom gaming PC at 12 or maybe 13. It ran XP, which needed a bit of tweaking to run some of my old DOS games.
Man, I do not miss dealing with Sound Blaster drivers.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 1 day ago
The phrase “IRQ in use” is still enough to give me nightmares.
avattar@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Yeah, changing IRQ addresses for peripherals until everything worked wad fun. /s
Also, some people thought it was black magic that I could hex edit a program’s executable to change it from English to Portuguese.
Stillwater@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Oh boy, sound blaster. As much of a pain getting everything to work back in the day was, I’m also nostalgic for it.
Anyway, generational lines are always blurry. I always find myself identifying with things defined to be part of the generation before or after mine anyway. I would call myself a “90s kid”, being born in the 80s, but I count that as an older millennial.
We got our first family computer when I was in grade school. It didn’t even have Windows, just DOS. So I first learned the command line. When we later got Windows 3.1, we didn’t have a mouse, so I learned to navigate the OS with keyboard only (to this day I have a preference for keyboard navigation). By the time I was in high school I knew how to code, build a computer from parts, etc. And started my life as a pirate with Napster.
My sister is a younger millennial, born in the 90s. By the time she was actively using a computer I think it was probably on XP. She probably wouldn’t know what defragmenting is or how to format a drive. But she didn’t have to learn that stuff.
As a millennial in general it seems we are the only generation who know how computers work as a rule. We had to help our grandparents and parents generation with every technical problem, and figured the kids of the future would surpass us. But now I have play the same tech support role for my kids generation, because they never learned that stuff either.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yeah I think the person you are replying to is somewhat confused. As a younger gen x on the cusp, all of my grade school friends (even those who would not later go into tech) knew how to disassemble and reassemble a PC. We had to scrounge for graphics cards, sound cards, hard drives, peripherals, use DOS. Install drivers. Dialed into BBS’s. Pirated software. We built that campy Web 1.0 shit in the 90s.