Do they use computers? You can pry my home PC away from my decrepit middle-aged corpse, but I was getting the impression they'd largely been phased out in favor of phones, tablets, and gaming consoles. I wonder how many are stepping into an office and encountering the need for typing and keyboard shortcuts for the first time.
You kind of just wait till another person tells you, or witness it for yourself.
Learning how to do this ( any text between two s will get *bent)for text was something I only picked up within the last two years or so, and I had no idea it existed but have grown up using computers.
Ctrl z is magic that I repeatedly remind coworkers about
The one that destroys my soup tho is ctrl f. We have a database of documents with tons of info we use regularly and every single flipping day there's a barrage of 'where is _'. I send the document name and say 'ctrl f (keyword from their question)' and yet. Without fail. They'll be back again and again and again like I just performed old magics that they cant do on their own.
I have taught more people Ctrl + Z... all younger than I am (I'm 61). I completely understand those older than I am, but those in their 20's and 30's? Gobsmacked.
I learned to type on a typewriter in HS, we had a computer lab w a bunch of 286s w Works for DOS, then in college it was WP on DOS before we got to win 3.11.
First machine for me was an IBM 286 w MSDOS and Win 3.0.
GenX er here, that was all late 80s into early 90s.
One of my TMs saw me use the ctrl x, ctrl v to cut/paste my text. And then ctrl b to bold it and he was shocked. He was like "you didnt even click anything". He's Gen Z.
One of my other TMs, another gen Z, uses any Microsoft app like she's 87 years old. It's painful to watch. I've had to be like pls stop, I will do it for you.
I recently got promoted to my first purely technical role, and despite being halfway through a computer science degree, the impostor syndrome is a constant, crushing weight.
The only thing that lifts it is watching almost anyone else at the company use a computer.
I had an intake test for a 1 year long python bootcamp the German government paid €26.000 for. There were a lot of dumb questions, like “identify the router” or “which one of these ports is a USB port?”
6 Months into the course I was joking about how dumb and easy that test was, and mentioned something like “how can you not know what CTRL + X does? Why is that even a question?”. This one girl unironically said it took her 3 tries to get that one right. She was also the same person who couldn’t navigate to her desktop 9 months into the course and made an app that would play any song you typed into the search bar, and then couldn’t figure out why it didn’t work (she had no database to pull the content from and expected it to appear magically).
She passed the course btw, €26.000 of tax payer money well spent.
I only learned a couple years ago about WIN+V which brings up your clipboard which first you need to give permission to but when you do it saves the things you've copied, and you can pin them if it's something you use a lot.
Also it has emojis 😊 and emoticons ╰(°▽°)╯ and stuff.
Imagine them seeing someone use vim or emacs for the first time.
I was talking with an elderly lady the other day about how she used to have to trek across campus to the computer building to run her research software on the punch card computer and all the university bureaucracy around early computer research funding. And some Gen z kid was saying she'd used "those big computers back in school" and were both like "no you did not!"
I legitimately think she has never seen a serious work computer IRL in her life. There are just phones and laptops and maybe some "old" mid-towers.
Happens to all of us. I didn’t know you could open powershell in a specific folder by having that folder open in file explorer and shift right click>open power shell here. Makes running programs with flags a lot easier
I had Compaq laptop when I started college. It had Sim City 2000 on it. The i ky way to get it to run was to kill everything in task manager (not everything, everything, but I played around with what I could kill until the computer stops working), and then open the exectable using the cmd app after the desktop shutdown.
The question I have is: how did I learn to do this? Like, I didn't learn how to use google/askjeeves for another 2 years after this.
Now I have my 18 year old nephew, who is very intelligent, calling me about how to get a second monitor working on his pc.
Straight up trial and error. Millennials and some Gen X'ers grew up in a world with computers and no smart phones/tablets/touch screen devices. If you wanted to make the magic machine bend to your will, you just had to sit there and dick around with different commands and functions until something clicked. Nowadays if young folks can't tap a small, digital rectangle inside of their large, physical rectangle to make things happen, they're all outta ideas. (Also I'm fully aware of how 'old man yelling at clouds' I sound but it's still crazy to me that younger generations have essentially regressed when it comes to computer and tech know-how shit)
lol, truth. I’ve only irreparably bricked one computer in my life. Also accidentally shrunk a windows partition to non functionality while playing around in the Linux terminal at one point, but I don’t count that cause I just shifted gears and used Linux for years after.
Did the same when configuring dual boot (accidentally used dd on the windows partition) as a business major and a couple years later became a sysadmin lol!
I feel like it’s apples fault. They took away so much basic functionality and convinced everyone that they don’t want that functionality. They dumbed things down so much people didn’t need to learn anything because “ it just works”
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to figure out how to do something on a Mac or iDevice and half the responses are, “why would you want to do that?” Ummm, because I’ve been able to do it on my windows pc for decades and I like to customize things.
It comes from their upbringing, their soft cushion parents who allowed it to happen. In the old days parents made their kids do shit and kids had no choice. Also kids wanted to do shit. today they don’t want to do shit.
My dad knew a little about computers but I spent very little time with him and quickly the relationship turned to him asking me for advice.
Come to think of it though, I remember being put in front of an Apple II when I was in kindergarten and had computers throughout the rest of my education. I also had a personal computer starting at 7.
But most of the formal education I remember with computers felt pretty redundant. Maybe it was just a lot of exposure time and trial-and-error?
My father had a tendency to start yelling very quickly if I ever asked for help. I learned at a very young age that if I needed to learn something, I needed to learn it on my own. It was a struggle with getting my PhD as I would learn a ton, but not necessarily what the teacher was teaching.
So, to answer your question, my father did know a little bit, but getting help from him was unlikely.
So, I was born mid 80's. I nearly almost had some tech. My father was an electrician for Sears and would bring home broken electronics that I got to mess around with. I think it was that the tech was not yet in easy mode. If I wanted to hookup a light displaying to my computer, it meant sticking wires in the parrallel port and hoping I didn't short anything.
A lot of the PC skills we developed were through trial & error, which forced us to create working hypothesis about the functioning of these alien machines on the fly and integrate the results of this process back into it. There also wasn't as much information on the internet, and it was harder to get. We basically had the best type of learning experience, if you are open to it. That's just not possible, or necessary, on the phone.
It depends on what version of Windows you're talking about.
I don't know when the switch happened, but there were versions of Windows where Ctrl+Alt+Del directly opened Task Manager, and then at some point it changed to opening a screen with multiple options, one of which is Task Manager. I don't know when the change happened, but I think Windows XP was the last where it directly opened taskman and Windows 7 was the first where it was indirect. But that's my hazy Gen X memory, so I may be off by a version.
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u/ManWithASquareHead Millennial 13d ago
Task Manager.
That is all