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We were quite fortunate on that front. We had a home PC from when I was about 10ish I think, and my dad was insistent that it was a 'proper' PC - IBM-compatible as it was termed at the time. Rather than a C64 or whatnot. So it was an IBM 286 processor, with 640KB of RAM and a 30MB hard disk. Quite something at the time!

But it scratched an itch I didn't know I had. The 286 was upgraded to a 486, then I bought a Pentium II to take to university, then at the end of university I built my first computer using the new at the time Athlon processor.

Then I got a job in IT support, entirely from the knowledge I'd built up from having PCs at home and trying to get games to run on them. It wasn't so easy back then. Kids today don't know they're born - having to modify your autoexec.bat and config.sys files to balance base memory, upper memory, extended memory and expanded memory according to game requirements... Even getting a joystick to work, or getting sound out of a sound card, was an effort.

And I've been in IT support ever since... Still love it.

I think this was my first gaming device...

https://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/grandstand-scramble-handheld/

 Sigur wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
The tech the kids are using these days is designed to make them customers, not users. They're all on Apple devices, in that closed ecosystem. The OS is basically a shopfront for apps and doesn't let them at a lot of the gubbins.

Even if they get excel, the versions for apple devices are not feature complete, so I often can't get them to do things like adding error bars to graphs correctly or whatever.

I'm totally radicalised against touchscreens for young people now. I will fight like mad not to send my daughter to a school with ipads when it's her time to go. We've had one to one devices for 10 years and it's been a pure disaster.

That's not a bad stance. Computer screens is what the world is run on, touchscreens is where hamburgers are ordered. I'm pretty sure that Android is no better than Apple in that regard; at least Android doesn't even try to give you a feeling of "we're your friends" like Apple seems to do.

It's so absurd that IT classes didn't get MUCH more, all based on open source software. This is where actual change could take place rather than teachers capitulating and we all are herded into the arms of digital leviathans.

The UK curriculum is, from what I've seen so far, actually pretty good on this.

Looking at what my son is doing at the moment in Computer Science (he's 12, in year 8 at school - Key Stage 3 in curriculum terms, which runs from age 11 to 14) on BBC Bitesize (UK parents, BBC Bitesize is a bloody godsend for school work. Use it!!!), it's computational thinking, algorithms, introduction to programming, hardware, software, networks, the internet, online safety, bias and reliability, law and ethics.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zvc9q6f

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There’s also a limit to how much IT knowledge I need to do my job.

I’ve learned to touch type over the years, and can do very basic fixes, most often clearing the browser cache. Pretty much anything else our IT department handles.

That leads me to wonder as to just how much knowledge the average employee needs about the worky bits of their computers.

So. I work in IT support for the user environment for a global corp. Desktop support, field services - whatever you call it. I'm the local guy in the office who knows most stuff, and who the users want to get in touch with but must get through the service desk barrier first... (I'm actually the expert for EMEA - I spend more time helping the other techs nowadays)

For most of our users, knowing MS Office to a basic level is fine. Having a general appreciation that computers are not f'ing magic, hardware has performance limits and you can't run a hundred damn things at once, is fine. Beyond that, we can work with you Well, we can still work with you anyway, but it hurts more...

Where we're struggling at the moment is that, in the UK at least, we had an extremely good local team and provided a very high-level bespoke hand-holding experience to our users - and as such they could really get away with knowing next to nothing, as we would know what they needed better than they did. Unfortunately, after 2 different outsource providers and a certain amount of cost-cutting, we're very much not in that position any more - but the users still know next to nothing, and still expect the previous experience...