Most people, regardless of age, have never been able to rebuild a transmission. That has never been a generation defining skill. It was only car enthusiasts, and more specifically motorheads, that has those skills. Did more older folks know how to work on their cars then today’s youths? Likely. At the same time modern cars are vastly more complex that cars of old. Almost none of those old hats would know the first thing about rebuilding a modern transmission, and the ones that do probably don’t have all of the special equipment needed to do it. If we include gender to this equation, what percentage of women in the general population do you think knew anything about working on cars? There were some, but I’d wager that is a really low percentage.
Your much older brother is an anomaly. There are exactly 0 people that I know that are 50+ years old that would know anything about fixing a TV. That is not a skill that a relatively large amount of people ever learned. I know many people that could identify a blown cap, and maybe with the advent of YouTube, could maybe figure out how to desolder and replace that component. Like with the cars, having skills in electrical engineering was never a generation defining trait.
Computers from the early 90’s+ have always been more complicated than old cars and TVs. Being able to do basic things on early PCs required more skills to the end user than knowing how to drive a car or use a TV. It was all new and nothing like anything before them. Cars were preceded by other ground transportation and TVs by radios for many years and knowing how to operate them at a basic level has always been relatively simple. Computers continued to evolve at an exponential rate in capabilities and complexity and if you grew up with them in your prime years, you had to be able to keep up.
Driving cars and using (dumb) TVs is very similar to how it was 70+ years ago. The invention and roll out of these to the masses took place over decades from when they first became available and during that time they were basically the same devices to the end user. Turn a switch and the TV powers on and you turn a knob to change the channel. With a car, you put in the key, put it in gear, gas in the right break on the left, maybe clutch on the far left. That is all most people needed to know, with specialist knowing more. That is very different from computers. Just turning on a computer didn’t do anything useful. It wasn’t intuitive to figure out and required reading a troubleshooting. That’s what every user had to experience, not just the specialists. The 90’s through 00’s brought with it significant changes in computers. It was a true technological renaissance and it took place over about 10-15 years which is when millennials grew up. That short amount of time and that much change isn’t remotely comparable to the slow and simple changes of past technologies.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Then why is it that several, peer reviewed, scientific studies have shown, repeatedly, that millennials are better with all forms of technology than boomers, X zoomers or alpha?
Fleur_@aussie.zone 5 days ago
The classic “several studies show” followed by exactly 0 mention of any studies.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 days ago
The studies are on all forms of Computer Technology, not car transmission or TV repair.
The people that built the home computer and the Internet were all Boomers! Woz is a boomer. Vint Cerf is a boomer.