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.
As an elder millennial, I believe we are far more computer literate than young millennials.
As a 90’s kid, I think we’re roughly on-par.
I grew up with Windows (95, then 98), DOS, MacOS 8, 9, and X, and used several Apple II computers at school. I was able to use dial-up on my own by like 7?
Built my first custom gaming PC at 12 or maybe 13. It ran XP, which needed a bit of tweaking to run some of my old DOS games.
Man, I do not miss dealing with Sound Blaster drivers.
The phrase “IRQ in use” is still enough to give me nightmares.
Yeah, changing IRQ addresses for peripherals until everything worked wad fun. /s
Also, some people thought it was black magic that I could hex edit a program’s executable to change it from English to Portuguese.
Oh boy, sound blaster. As much of a pain getting everything to work back in the day was, I’m also nostalgic for it.
Anyway, generational lines are always blurry. I always find myself identifying with things defined to be part of the generation before or after mine anyway. I would call myself a “90s kid”, being born in the 80s, but I count that as an older millennial.
We got our first family computer when I was in grade school. It didn’t even have Windows, just DOS. So I first learned the command line. When we later got Windows 3.1, we didn’t have a mouse, so I learned to navigate the OS with keyboard only (to this day I have a preference for keyboard navigation). By the time I was in high school I knew how to code, build a computer from parts, etc. And started my life as a pirate with Napster.
My sister is a younger millennial, born in the 90s. By the time she was actively using a computer I think it was probably on XP. She probably wouldn’t know what defragmenting is or how to format a drive. But she didn’t have to learn that stuff.
As a millennial in general it seems we are the only generation who know how computers work as a rule. We had to help our grandparents and parents generation with every technical problem, and figured the kids of the future would surpass us. But now I have play the same tech support role for my kids generation, because they never learned that stuff either.
I am too. I ran across a yt vid the other day talking about how in the DOS games era apparently there was something called the MT-32, which cost around the equivalent of $2000 USD, but the sound was amazing. Instead of the tinnier output of sound blaster, some DOS games actually had full music tracks in their games.
Still though, think of how much less memorable that sound would be if we didn’t have it.
He goes through and compares PC speaker, Sound Blaster, and MT-32 for a bunch of games like King’s Quest IV, Monkey Island, Space Quest 3, one of the Leisure Suit Larrys, and even an Indy Jones game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R14XeuTXwaU
Yeah I think the person you are replying to is somewhat confused. As a younger gen x on the cusp, all of my grade school friends (even those who would not later go into tech) knew how to disassemble and reassemble a PC. We had to scrounge for graphics cards, sound cards, hard drives, peripherals, use DOS. Install drivers. Dialed into BBS’s. Pirated software. We built that campy Web 1.0 shit in the 90s.