My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.
I mean, windows 95 was kind of the tipping point for consumer GUI-first general purpose computing, right? For the common person, using a computer went from reading manpages and learning syntax (at least the bare minimum required to launch a GUI shell), to being presented with a much more limited set of easily discoverable operations.
Gen Z using chromebooks and iPads are just the extension of that. The operations exposed by an application are generally way more limited than they were on windows 9x, and also way more discoverable.
See kids can’t use computers
As a gen-z, no one would use chromebooks if they had the option not to. Schools force them on everyone.
Yeah nobody is blaming you homie.
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Yeah, but if the common person were using a computer, they would be reading manpages. For the common person, using a computer meant reading manpages. Which is exactly what I said.
Also, having fewer techy people is the same thing as having a lower percentage when the population size is similar (which it is). If gen z has a lower percentage of techy people, that means they have fewer techy people.
Holy moly man.
Sort of. Macs were doing this in the 80’s but they were super expensive. Still a popular option for schools, though. Growing up, we usually had Apple II’s in class (88-93ish) with Macs in some classrooms. It wasn’t until around the '95 era or just before that home computers became affordable, so it’s probably most people’s major exposure to GUI computing. Prior to '95, if you had a computer in the home, it was probably DOS-based and you maybe used WIn3.1. But Win3.1 wasn’t great, and quite a lot of home computers at this time were too underpowered to do much running it, so although I had access to Win3.1, in practice even at about 10yrs old, I just booted to DOS and often had to run programs off of floppies because HDD space was super limited and very expensive. When '95 dropped, it was definitely a paradigm shift in my house to go to that being the primary interface instead of DOS.
OS/2 had a following back then too. I was running BBS software on it, around the time of Win95’s release. I’d started dabbling with Linux, but h/w compatibility was an issue back then - I ran it without X for a year or so, and it beat DOS in many ways. When I got X working, OS/2 lost most of its value to me. I do remember missing REXX though.