How is it possible we are actually the techie ones?

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Herky_T_Hawk@reddit

Born in a time when tech didn’t “just work”, but then high school and college when it did. Plus the right age for computer gaming to explode when many people built their own computers rather than buying a premade one.

That forced us to learn how tech worked.

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pizzabirthrite@reddit

The last people on earth that can set up a printer.

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U_SMUG_MOTHERFUCKER@reddit

Or build a PC

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6strings10holes@reddit

Kids now build gaming PCs. If say at least as frequently as people did in the 90s.

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U_SMUG_MOTHERFUCKER@reddit

Fair. But I suspect this is an even smaller minority now

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Smokeythemagickamodo@reddit

Tbf. Building a computer is basically giant lego blocks.

Been doing it for decades here

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Ashamed-Status-9668@reddit

They are now. We used to have to flip all sorts of pin switches back in the day. Required reading the motherboard manual etc.

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Smokeythemagickamodo@reddit

Yep!

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6strings10holes@reddit

It has gotten easier than it used to be. Before plug and play, getting things to be recognized could be difficult. But even that has been around for a long time, probably mid 90s.

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Smokeythemagickamodo@reddit

Yeah. 90’s computers were something else, mainly the software.

Finding drivers for each component and then getting them to work.

Kids will never know

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pizzabirthrite@reddit

Legos fit in more ways. Computers are specific enough to follow basic instructions. More like IKEA furniture.

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Smokeythemagickamodo@reddit

Yeah and work with them enough and it’s easier than furniture

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CubistHamster@reddit

It's mostly a much easier process though. My default assumption used to be that any new build was going to take a good bit of troubleshooting between completing assembly and first successful POST.

Major components have a much lower DOA rate, modular power supplies have made internal hookups and cable routing easier (along with [mostly] getting rid of molex.)

PCIe channel distribution is kind of a mess now, though a lot of that is an issue of adequate explanations because for some reason, motherboard manufacturers seem utterly incapable of writing manuals that explain it clearly. (Also, PCIe saturation is mostly only a problem for weirdos like me who fill up all their NVME slots and SATA ports. I miss when consumer grade boards came with 8+ SATA ports...)

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valthonis_surion@reddit

I just rebuilt an old PC for dual booting DOS and WIN98 games. It was sorta fun to revisit autoexec.bat and config.sys

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Knusperwolf@reddit

And also the first.

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cbih@reddit

To be fair, printers are the devil

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trifecta000@reddit

PC LOAD LETTER?! WTF does that mean?

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MIOTCH007@reddit

gif

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macrocosm93@reddit

Also the adults in our lives were mostly clueless so we had to figure everything out for ourselves.

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user_name_unknown@reddit

I parents didn’t have technology and our kids have plug and play. We were there to work out the kinks.

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VitalArtifice@reddit

I remember having to set up a boot disk to free up enough RAM for the sound card to actually work. That’s my walking-in-the-snow-for-three-miles story for the kids.

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Virtual-Barnacle-150@reddit (OP)

Bought 256k of ram for the Tandy 1000 to Play WItW is Carman Sandiago

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svengeiss@reddit

Coding my website in note pad in ‘95. lol.

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Virtual-Barnacle-150@reddit (OP)

Amongst other things 🤣

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Virtual-Barnacle-150@reddit (OP)

Nice, I had bootleg frontpage

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graveybrains@reddit

I hosted my first one on comcast, and their server didn't like whatever Microsoft used for cr lf characters... had to do the whole thing in DOS Edit 😂

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ParmigianoMan@reddit

I once had to download a driver in Japanese just to get a hard drive working. That was the best part of 30 years ago, long before Google Translate came along.

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j7style@reddit

This is basically exactly what I was going to say. Everyone born after us, even younger millennials, grew up in a world where for the most part, the tech just worked. We had that tiny little bubble of years in which tech didn't just work, we had to make it work, often without internet help. We had to learn to diagnose issues and find fixes for them, and quite often. By the mid 2000s, we had all put our collective knowledge on the internet via forums and such, which allowed younger generations to bypass their personal tech support arc. No one needed to diagnose why when you connected x to y without doing z, it wouldn't load up, because you could just search for the answer in a few minutes vs hours of tinkering.

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LoosieLawless@reddit

We all code html. Thanks Tom.

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cloudshaper@reddit

Sparkle text was such a gateway drug.

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graveybrains@reddit

We hit the sweet spot where it was everywhere, it was simple enough that we could understand it, but it wasn't so simple we didn't need to understand it.

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tweedchemtrailblazer@reddit

What’s even weirder is it’s not the millennials. It’s like peak tech literacy happened with people born in 1980 and it’s just going downhill from there.

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theforestbather@reddit

I agree. The people in my office range in age from 22 to 63, and somehow I'm the only one who knows how to edit a PDF?!

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-DementedAvenger-@reddit

PDFs are stupid though. I know about them and most of their limitations and CAN edit them if necessary…but I never want to and always try to convince users to not use them at all if they can.

I just hate them so much.

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zenerNoodle@reddit

Analog childhood followed by a digital adolescence. Tech never stopped being a new and interesting thing for us. When we are exposed to a new tech thing, we make it work.

In my life, I've been fortunate enough to encounter many true Greybeards of tech. People who played with tech before transistors. All of them still had that feeling of interest and novelty with regard to new tech. I distinctly remember a fascinating discussion I had with an 80-year-old EE about miniaturization in accelerometers, prompted by the ones in front of us being smaller than a dime, and their first experience with one was the size of a big-screen CRT.

Tech will never stop being interesting.

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Apprehensive_Hat8986@reddit

We grew up with either, "figure it out," or "go play with something else." So we figured it out.

Maybe this means there's a higher percentage of people in our generation who learned the larger lesson of, "holy shit, I can figure it out myself," but they do exist in every generation. What there are also in every generation are the other sorts, who never learned or just choose to ignore that they can learn on their own if they just try.

It's kind of heart-breaking really, to see that one of our greatest strengths as a species is just... ignored by a significant amount of us.

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Pleasant-Onion157@reddit

My level was "figure-it-out-titude" is very high. I correlate a large part of that as a positive consequence of being a latch-key kid.

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Skathen@reddit

Born in a time when you had to read the manual or get taught how to do something. No farming your brain out to google or chatgpt. That built strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.

For example, actually having to read a hard drive label for the settings to manually type into the bios. Learning the hard way what master slave position on the ide was and the jumper pins. Etc.

IRQ settings PTSD

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der_innkeeper@reddit

Googling is a skill. Finding the right video on YouTube to guide you through the process is a skill.

Using Chat/LLMs as a tool is a skill.

Reading the manual is a skill.

"Having to know where to look for something across disparate media" is the root skill.

Googling to find a manual for an appliance/part/car that hasn't been made since 1999 is a skill.

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Pleasant-Onion157@reddit

My google skills have always been high. Part of that was figuring it out lol

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Such_Reference_8186@reddit

Was it IRQ 5 or 7????..sound card configs sucked

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BoysenberryKind5599@reddit

I think this has a large part to do with it, and the way we view life in general. No one is going to help me, I have to do it myself.

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Drew_of_all_trades@reddit

Anyone else remember making boot disks in DOS 6.0 to allocate enough RAM to play gold box d&d computer games on your 486dx? Then you had to use a decoder wheel with arcane symbols on it to get past the copy protection? Entertainment used to require resourcefulness.

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Vondi@reddit

People who were young in the age of Desktop computers are the real technological natives. People who just had a tablet as a kid learned NOTHING about using a computer.

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ClockwrkAngel2112@reddit

Have definitely seen this in some younger members of our online gaming community. They play on PC, but that means buy a PC, take it out of the box, and plug it in. I built my first few computers, and that sounds so foreign to them. Maybe because now we just plug the PS5 in and let it update?

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Santos_L_Halper_II@reddit

God this reminded me of that annoying as fuck "what's a computer?" commercial from a few years ago.

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FoppyRETURNS@reddit

Exactly

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Combatical@reddit

From the time I learned to program the VCR to record my moms Soap Operas I knew I was in trouble.

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Mike__O@reddit

My wife is a high school teacher and runs into this all the time at work. Her kids struggle with a lot of tech stuff. Her theory is that kids these days (I said the thing!) grew up in a world where UIs are generally simple and intuitive and are generally used to things just working. When they don't work, the kids seem to struggle with figuring out why and how to fix it.

For our generation, today's backdoors WERE the way to make things work. We could find files buried in folders and stuff like that because that's just how we grew up using computers, and phones work more or less the same way in the background.

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StoltSomEnSparris@reddit

Boomers: "Is the harddrive the heart of the mothermodem?" Us: "I downloaded some more ram so that you can update your printer drivers. I also uploaded your conscience into the cloud in case you ever need a backup." Millennials: "What's a usb?"

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gimmeslack12@reddit

I will forever hate printers. Plain and simple.

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Klutzy-Delivery-5792@reddit

We had to actually figure out how to use the tech and work with it when it broke and such so we understand more of the fundamentals. We built our own computers and fixed them ourselves. The younger generations didn't experience this at the same level we did. You can't even really fix a MacBook anymore without highly specialized tools, for example, so you have to take it to a "Genius" bar and have them do it.

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Virtual-Barnacle-150@reddit (OP)

Hey now. I just replaced a battery in mine. Ifixit.com is a wonderful site with quality everything

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Ok-Somewhere-2325@reddit

In the windows x p era, i learned how to do a ton of things and a bunch of different programs, just because I clicked on the help.Icon. and read through the built in help guides, which turns out to be the entire user manual.And how to do everything. It was like I discovered a magic tome

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adimadoz@reddit

There is a joke about technology by Nate Bargatze. In my opinion he’s the xennial ambassador of stand up comedians.

https://youtu.be/B6DD9yjHeIAhttps://youtu.be/B6DD9yjHeIA

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Turbulent-Pea-8826@reddit

I attribute my level of tech savvy to 1. having to print papers out and having the printer not work. 2. Trying to get PC games to work.

Printers also helped me to learn not to procrastinate. Never failed that I finish a paper the night before and the printer won’t work. It’s 9 o’clock at night and I am shit out of luck on any alternatives. Professors wouldn’t let you email them the paper.

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mgcat17@reddit

For real. Never thought having to use C Prompt to get to Wolfenstein 3D would translate into general tech ability. And I’m not even a computer/tech person!

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Epicardiectomist@reddit

I've read about this, and I harp on it with my son. He's really into modern technology, but I keep trying to get him to understand that where he'll succeed is learning how to walk through the back doors. We had no choice but to learn where files went when they were downloaded, how to run a game or program from a C prompt, hell I was swapping out video cards and replacing motherboards simply because it needed to be done.

You can be a wizard with navigating apps and such, but have basically zero understanding of how any of it operates.

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GQDragon@reddit

This has been confirmed.

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GeetarEnthusiast85@reddit

Plus, we had weekly technology classes in school.

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pinchenombre@reddit

Yes. We are amazing techies

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Separate_Counter9427@reddit

That's funny!

Now do you still remember how to record a show or movie on a VHS tape while watching another program?

Or renting a VHS from Blockbuster or other video store and record it on a blank VHS tape?

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pimphand5000@reddit

Easy peasy

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Skore_Smogon@reddit

Tech was rapidly evolving as we grew up. It forced us all to be unwitting super users.

I've gone from playing games and listening to music on cassette tapes and floppy disks to literally distilling a game out of the air onto a screen as thin as the cardboard a tube TV was boxed up in.

Along the way I and all of you picked up some skills.

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WandaMildew80@reddit

It's why I became the default IT person at work. The older folks don't understand technology and have no clue how to use it. The younger people don't understand anything not web-based (we still have an onsite server). No one else is capable of troubleshooting or installing things. It's exhausting sometimes, lol.

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Glitter_Sparkle@reddit

I think it’s something that extends to millennials and gen x too. Boomers and zoomers like the convenience of smartphones and tablets. While there are some outliers like my dad who was born in 1950 and started using computers at uni when they were very complicated. In general it’s the 30 - 55 age group who learned how to use desktop PCs that often didn’t just work, especially if they had Windows ME on them.

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jkanoid@reddit

It’s good to have skills!
I’m retired now, but was in SWDev for 30 years, and was always surrounded by people my (old) age, or older, that were techie. I always assumed everyone my age was tech-aware until I started to help with level 2 support. Then I realized that people my age generally did NOT inherently know the common patterns of IT, just their applications, sometimes. They could use a hammer, a chair, and a coffee cup, but that was it. Sobering.

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CubesFan@reddit

I think it's because we were the Analog generation that switched to digital. This means our brains had to learn both and then troubleshoot to get it working. It has less to do with being techie and more to do with how our brains approach new stuff. We had a major shift that forced us to switch hard and that prepared us to be able to handle that same stuff now.

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Horror-Writer33@reddit

I’m 40 and worked with an 18 year old intern over the summer and the guy could barely login to windows, had no idea what the tab button was for, no idea that you could leave a window open - like he would close a window immediately after using it, just a weird generation that can use apps but not a pc or laptop.

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scotthibbard@reddit

I definitely feel that. I've always worked in computers (IT now development) so it's not surprising for me but my wife is a nurse and yet she's also the one who frequently has to explain tech things to family/coworkers. That led to her becoming a "super user" on the charting software at work and later becoming a full time software support person (clinical informatics).

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emotyofform2020@reddit

I work in tech, so… no.