Young people today were brought up on tablets and web apps, they know less about how computers work than people bought up 20 years ago (assuming they had computer access).
Yes, I understood that. I just assume that young people today are no different from young people 25 years ago, other than maybe having the (dis)advantage of preexisting knowledge of today's computing. Which may be the parent's point, I guess?
I see a lot of kids who grew up with tablets and stuff, and they've learned nothing at all about computers - they learn how to run various apps. And that's it.
yes, not too many people tinkered with their computers then. But the real question is: how many of those who tinkered then, would tinker now if they were born in the 00s? Probably less then if they were born in the 80s, just because e.g. ipads or smartphones are not to be tinkered with. I mean many pupils have problems just working at a laptop (e.g. understanding the file system) because they never did it at home where all they might know are smartphones. So there definitely is a very different technological structure today than back then.
Seriously, the old stuff will not interest kids today. For us it's just nostalgia. I guarantee you, if I was a kid today A) I would still be a huge computer geek, and B) I would still figure out how it works (maybe not at as low a level).
I am amazed how computer illiterate teenagers in my family are. Kids in my generation who grew up in the early 90s were pretty good with computers in general. We had to learn how to deal with BSOD, buggy software and clunky desktop UIs.
Kids today seem to easily get confused if something doesn't just work, seem to rely more on voice commands to do things, and get easily confused by context menus and other desktop-UI elements not common on touch devices. They're also awful typists.
None of the teens in my family have a computer, nor do they want one. They have their phones and tablets, but they don't see any need for a computer. Again, I contrast this with my generation where everyone wanted a computer for MSN Messenger and MySpace.
For me a laptop is my "default" device – 99% of stuff I do I'll want to do on my laptop. Emails, web browsing, even Signal / WhatsApp I'll connect to my laptop because I find it quicker and easier to type. I almost never use my iPad unless on holiday. I think kids today are the opposite – they see phones and tablets as their default device for all that stuff and tend to see laptops and desktops as just work machines for word processing, etc..
We've grown up to something technically harder-to-use than an iPad, and I'm comparing today's equivalent.
If we normalize this to current HN audience's childhood (roughly), it's more like not touching a computer and not seeing a modem until 20s, while all the kids know at least how to turn a computer, use Windows Explorer/Mac Finder, developed motor skills to use a keyboard efficiently, know how to modify Word docs etc. and the social norm is knowing all these things (as opposed to our chilhood).
Sure, a legendary hacker might arise after touching a computer first time after 20s, but much less likely.
I was born in the mid 80s; in my youth many families didn't have a home computer, and computer education in schools was... less developed than it is now. So if you met a kid who was good with computers in 1996, in all probability they sat down at their family computer and figured things out for themselves.
There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same.
With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer.
You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally.
>Most of them don't know a thing about computers. It's a magic box with a small selection of shiny buttons on. They use it for passive media consumption.
You'd be surprised.
Except by "know about computers" you mean they known about interrupts, and cache lines, and filesystem design, and other stuff that are completely inconsequential to using their computers.
>Well, they clearly forget by the time they're twenty.
Actually the linked article states the opposite:
>"This current generation of young people has never lived without tech," said Linda Rosen, CEO of Change the Equation. "It's second nature to them." Yet, using technology for social reasons doesn't make a person adept at using it in other settings, she said.
So it's not that they "forgot" something, it's that they never bothered to learn it in the first place, e.g. Excel or whatever. But computers, for what they do like to use them for, are "second nature" to them according to TFA.
That said, kids also don't know how to use computers anymore. Kids growing up right now, many of them don't know how to operate a desktop computer and some of them may never touch anything that isn't a walled garden mobile device / tablet. For example, pretty much all millennials understand the difference between software running locally on their device and the "backend" components running on a server somewhere (and that something could be completely client-side without a server). Zoomers have a hard time understanding this distinction and ask questions like "how is this program opening without internet?" (I would know, I mentor 100s of them as a coding bootcamp mentor).
I don't think it's controversial to suggest that the world of "computers" today doesn't look much like the 80s and 90s. Back then, the most child-friendly computing device one could hope to be exposed to was probably a speak-and-spell (or a fiendishly difficult NES cartridge). If the kids back then -- now tech workers -- wanted to mess around with a computer, it was more effortful to engage with and presented even greater challenge once one was actually comfortable with it.
I had the advantage of a few family members already involved with computers, but I remember learning about colour depth with some ridiculous dinosaur game, about bootdisks so I could play Commander Keen, and how not to install X-Wing (don't ask). The act of using the computer was inextricable from learning about how it worked, and that knowledge could be immediately reemployed in more interesting use. I know a west-coast-style guy who works in a brewery and lives for Ultimate Frisbee, but he also understands scripting better than any non-tech person I know because in his youth he was seriously into Diablo 2 and its bot scene.
Contrast this to the modern iPad. No edges to cut yourself on, no seams to pry up, no tacit understanding gained, and the big draw being the meta-TV of YouTube...
When I had my first computer as a kid (~8yo) and no one to teach me about the inner workings, I still felt that I wanted to dig deep into it. As the years passed by and saw the evolution from dial-up to all-day-long available & fast connections, tons of material to learn online, videos on demand... I thought oh wow, the next generations are going to have so much IT knowledge very early!
Turns out that today, in my humble experience, it’s very rare to find geeky (pre)teens unless they have geeky parents (and not even then). Computers became much more simplified, problem-free and in different forms to mostly consume content. So the curiosity that grew inside of me while solving daily computer problems is very difficult nowadays as most of the issues aren’t very challenging (which is very good for the average user).
My sister is a teacher and confirms: While kids play around with their smartphones all the time, they are remarkably ignorant about the basics of computing. They are users, watching videos and composing texts, but when it comes to drivers (okay, who in today's world installs drivers themselves), OS installations, BIOS, but also simpler things like proper backups or Excel formulas, they are completely clueless.
> People born after that date are the digital natives; those born before are digital immigrants, doomed to be forever strangers in a computer-based strange land.
That's a ridiculous notion anyway. If you put in time and effort, you can learn pretty much anything, and computers and programming are no different, no matter the age. And if you do not put in time and effort, you always remain ignorant. It really is that simple.
I would have thought it was the systems/hardware focus. The kids nowadays just assume the hardware is magic and try to ignore it as much as possible while writing their billion dollar websites.
> Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.
Prime example of juvenoia and biased stereotypical thinking right there. "Back in my days ..." ™
I know more kids in the ages up to 13 who are interested in actually exploring and working with technical stuff (programming and electronics for example) than kids who spend their most time just "consuming" and using these things. The main reason is that these things are much more accessible these days. YMMV, depending on your social and demographic environment I guess ...
I do miss the days when every teenager who "knows computers" was thought to be more technically competent than adults with 10 years of industry experience and every small business and sole proprietor in existence was looking for a 100% custom website design and was willing to pay an 8th grader rather than a web design firm. Such were the early 00s / my teen years.
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