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Honestly its crazy to me - I recall our IT classes not being the most in-depth and they kind of felt more like "MS userguides" at times or got very heavy with management style buzzwords - esp at A level. Eg you'd be told "ok so you use good data protection and firewalls" but you were never really taught hot it worked or how to tell a good one from a bad one or anything.
So management level.


But at least you had an awareness of a bunch of things and could use most MS software to a basic level. Easily enough to then pick up tutorials or more advanced classes if you wanted and be familiar.


Strikes me as nuts that schools would get rid of IT classes. I'd have expected them to get MORE in depth as time went on. If you assumed kids would have more basic understanding surely the right path would have been to teach them more considering that we are increasingly in an IT heavy world (HECK it was an IT heavy world 30 years ago back when most of us were going through school and its not reduced one bit since then)



But yeah if schools have cut classes then that would explain why they've never seen a spreadsheet. Which just baffles me honestly.

I think I was too early for Excel. We did have it, but we never had any lessons on how to use it. Mind you, at that point in time IT was a G.C.S.E. option, at least at my school.

To this day, I’m still baffled by Excel, and bribe/annoy colleagues into making any spreadsheet I might need beyond the most very basic “this is how I keep track of my cases and what I’m doing on each”

I've a decent grasp of its basics enough that if I want to do anything more complicated I can generally follow guides I find online. The real trick is finding guides that do the thing I want them to do so I can copy whatever code/setup they've done.

But most of the time I use it to add up stuff or review excel spreadsheets on stuff.

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.

Back in the day I helped my mum out doing data entry for gymnastics competitions. Unfortunately they didn’t have an excel licence so I had to use stupid Lotus 123 instead. I hated it.

Our house's first consol was an Atari 2600. It was my older brothers', but we got to play with it too. I still have it, and the other week I got my mind blown when I learned that if you plug in the controller from a Sega Genisis, it will totally function as an Atari controller.

I think those of us born in the late 70's to mid 80's are a very special breed. We have one foot into understanding tech, while still being able to function in a 100% analog world.

Things that I don't get about the youth today are some of their social trends. I saw something called "free walking". Basically going for a walk without earbuds, texting, etc. Yeah.... in my day we just called that walking. Or the term "raw dogging", as in not having any entertainment for a flight or long drive as some test of machismo. That's basically the norm of my childhood.

I saw the greatest "I'm old" moment
earlier at the shop, as I was buying a new book.

A kid said to his (I'm assuming) Dad, "Wait, you have to read books to play this game?"

 cuda1179 wrote:
Our house's first consol was an Atari 2600. It was my older brothers', but we got to play with it too. I still have it, and the other week I got my mind blown when I learned that if you plug in the controller from a Sega Genisis, it will totally function as an Atari controller.

I think those of us born in the late 70's to mid 80's are a very special breed. We have one foot into understanding tech, while still being able to function in a 100% analog world.

Things that I don't get about the youth today are some of their social trends. I saw something called "free walking". Basically going for a walk without earbuds, texting, etc. Yeah.... in my day we just called that walking. Or the term "raw dogging", as in not having any entertainment for a flight or long drive as some test of machismo. That's basically the norm of my childhood.

You could still 'raw dog' a long trip back then... when you forgot your book (or books) at home.

Raw Dogging used to mean something else when I was young.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Raw Dogging used to mean something else when I was young.

I think it still means that. I was afraid to comment earlier.

Man, you mean walking around and just.....lookin' at stuff for entertainment? How could anyone possibly DO that??? *sarcasm*

Now, here’s a proper personal one!

The not exactly pleasant but necessary job of clearing out Mum and Dad’s house commenced this weekend.

And it turned up Mum’s recipe folder. All print outs and magazine cuttings and that. But for millennial Harry Potter twist? I noted the hand written, erm, notes, that Mum left on certain ones. A tweak to the technique, a reckoning on the measurements. A swap out ingredient. Like The Half Blood Prince’s potions book.

Lovely stuff. And a good reason to invest in printed recipe books.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Now, here’s a proper personal one!

The not exactly pleasant but necessary job of clearing out Mum and Dad’s house commenced this weekend.

And it turned up Mum’s recipe folder. All print outs and magazine cuttings and that. But for millennial Harry Potter twist? I noted the hand written, erm, notes, that Mum left on certain ones. A tweak to the technique, a reckoning on the measurements. A swap out ingredient. Like The Half Blood Prince’s potions book.

Lovely stuff. And a good reason to invest in printed recipe books.

I've got a bookshelf full of that!
Mom's volumes.
Volumes from both of my Grandmothers...
My Great Grandmothers volumes (wich also has some pages from her Mom)....
So accumulated cooking wisdom spanning 1880s(?) - 2020

 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.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone else remember the joy of swapping diskettes when you were loading a game (X-wing or TIE Fighter, for instance) onto a PC?

Insert disk C

Loading....

Insert disk D

Loading....

Insert Disk A

Huh?

I think I still have the 14 disc set of 3.5's needed to install Win95 somewhere....

For those around my age, how much rage did you have as a child with The Oregon Trail?

I downloaded an emulated version of it a couple of years ago and my kids darn near came to tears when their almost perfect game go hit with a failed river crossing.

 cuda1179 wrote:
For those around my age, how much rage did you have as a child with The Oregon Trail?

I downloaded an emulated version of it a couple of years ago and my kids darn near came to tears when their almost perfect game go hit with a failed river crossing.

This one was odd for me. We barely had computers in my school and we didn't really have anywhere near enough time allotted to them to understand and appreciate the options in Oregon Trail to begin figuring it out. Being an avid NES kid, I was pretty accustomed to unfair nonsense in games and since Orgeon Trail's controlled sections are a little rough, I mostly just thought it was cheap garbage they peddled to schools like most of the other edutainment options. I'd seen the LJN logo before. The game isn't garbage, but I didn't appreciate it until years later when I was able to actually take the time and learn the game.

 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

 cuda1179 wrote:
For those around my age, how much rage did you have as a child with The Oregon Trail?

I downloaded an emulated version of it a couple of years ago and my kids darn near came to tears when their almost perfect game go hit with a failed river crossing.

For me, my version of Oregon Trail should've been sponsored by the NRA.

I remember buying bullets and tapping the space bar repeatedly when anything showed up.

I would sell everything and buy more ammunition. I was the third kid in my class to finish.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I'm still amazed at how many people now don't use a laptop or home PC. Granted they were never cheap items, but phones and consoles are around aplenty and are not cheap either.

I very much get using phones on the go, but the idea of surfing the net and doing everything with a phone would drive me nuts. Just typing alone is slower and more fiddly and annoying, not to mention it takes forever to read or view anything on those tiny screens.

As an option/choice sure - but as their only means of accessing the net and computing it just baffles me.


Esp since when we went through school we learned most of those basic things in computing classes anyway. So I'm also left wondering if schools just gave up/never daught computing classes at all now

I think you overestimate how online most people are. Most people don't read anything other than headlines and don't type anything other than texts. A phone does everything they need, even if it severely limits what they can do.

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.

 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...

I was playing an RPG set in the early 90's and the idea of a cassette recorder came up for a reporter.

**** Spoiler image for size*****


Two players had no idea what I was talking about.

I think I started feeling old when my pop culture references started going over colleague’s heads. Or when I’m asked what my Berk and Boni tattoos are.

Oh globbits!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I think I started feeling old when my pop culture references started going over colleague’s heads. Or when I’m asked what my Berk and Boni tattoos are.

 Flinty wrote:
Oh globbits!

If you are afraid that your references are above your colleague’s heads, don't worry, your references are stationed on the ISS when it comes to me.

Crispy78 wrote:
...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...

I know very little about the corporate world, but that sounds eerily similar to stories I've heard before.... :/

On early computing? I misremembered, as we did have a PC. Green Screen, Dot Matrix Printer, 5 3/4” floppy drive. So old, you could only load one program at a time, from disc. And if you wanted to print? You had to save the file first, or it wouldn’t print amendments.

So, essentially, whilst physically had a PC, we didn’t, for any practical application, have a PC. I’m not sure it even ran Windows 3.1.

Our first pc ran windows 3.11. It was a pentium, 90Mhz, CD-Rom, 16MB sound card, 8MB Ram (IIRC). Played everything up to Commandos/Starcraft. There it started to struggle. My first PC game was Silent Thunder: A10 Tank Killer II, my second PC game was C&C2:Red Alert the christmas thereafter.

The most magical thing was when we first connected that to the later, newer PC (200MHz) and my brother and I played C&C2 over LAN across the house. Mind-blowing stuff.

Pentium Win 3.11 was definitely a pretty magical time. Not my first computer but certainly one of the first where I had the ability to really do things. Logging out of Windows to hit a DOS prompt, manually configuring graphic and sound devices and the like.

I equate a lot of the games of that time with the Sega CD era of FMV. Myst, Burn:Cycle and the point and click adventure era. Mechwarrior 2 was the big deal for me personally, both as my first fights with the concept of performance and accidentally charging a bunch to try and get NetMech working as my first online matches.