The smart phone generation seem to have lower computer literacy than millennials largely due to smart phones hiding away a lot of the workings. In the UK age verification for adult sites came into force yesterday and like everywhere streaming services are getting very enshittified. This is going to lead kids to discovering tor, VPNs, pirating, how to make deep fakes (to fool ai based age verification), and other ways of getting what they want without restrictions.
Gen X would have had to program everything themselves at one point, because there was no internet and no portable storage media, so when you got a game or program at a store, it was the source code and you had to type it all in, and possibly fix bugs and errors along the way.
It wasn’t everyone in the entire generational cohort working from first principles to build a massive network. You’re describing a tiny fraction of the modern tech sector doing work that was far more electrical than comp sci within a sector that was primarily academic and heavy industrial.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Gen X cohort was still learning to use slide rules and practice pre-Excel accounting standards, when they weren’t just… pouring concrete or welding car parts or cleaning out chemical drums with pressure hoses.
You’re describing a career path that was in the low hundred thousands back in the 1990s, which has swelled to the millions in the 2020s. And even then, we’re talking about a workforce in the hundreds of millions. The vast majority of Americans have never been techies and never will be.
Beginning of genx is close or a few years after beginning of internet.
It wasn’t something Joe Random could use even decade or two after, but just mentioning for correct perspective.
That is technically true. It would be more accurate to say world wide web didn’t exist.
We had portable storage. Magnetic tape and paper. Floppy and hard drives existed but were gor the most part out of the reach for consumers
I understand however the c64 usually had a floppy when bought in the states
Spending 7 hours copying code from a magazine only to find you did a dumb on line 538 was a magical experience
I remember typing in BASIC programs for my commodore from a magazine. It actually did teach me quite a bit about coding.
Born between '65 and '80? I’m from the lower half of that age bracket and I never did that even once. Knowing the magic incantations to load the game from tape to memory, yes.
Typing in was never “a thing” in the sense that yes, people did it, magazines had these pages of code, but there have been popular consumer friendly ways to load software right from the start. The start being the start of mass adoption of home computers.
I’m a millennial and I did it more than once on hardware older than I was, but because I wanted to, not because there were no other options.
load “jumpman”, 8, 1
Press play on tape…
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