Good grief! The word is excluded. Holy shit.
I think that being forced to learn about WINE at a young age may have been beneficial actually (if extremely unpleasant)
Linux didn’t exist when I was 12. 😑
what operating system was that atari with a keyboard you could plug 2800 carts into
Atari OS, which could only be used to access the floppy drive. Atari DOS could be booted from a floppy disk. I never used one of these machines, I skimmed the Wikipedia article on Atari 8-bit computers..
That was also AutistOS
First computer I used was DOS.
Also DOS, the single button on the Mac mouse was a whole new way of using a computer.
Mine had 3.1 on it, but most of the games had to b3 run through dos prompt
What about people who started on DOS?
The majority of people I know who have major computer problems solve them by buying another computer
I’m not even that tech illiterate, but I almost did that… My laptop was being slow, and I still had like 4k€ in overtime hours that I could buy Hardware from at work (it’s a great deal because I neither have to pay VAT on the hardware nor income taxes on the money from the overtime), so I was like, eh, might as well get a new laptop.
So then I read up on what laptop brands are out there, found out about Framework, and when I excitedly told my electrical engineer husband about it he was like “You knooow that you can easily replace parts in any laptop, right?”
Well, I didn’t know that (just kinda assumed laptops were more like phones than they are like desktop PCs), so I ended up just ordering a new SSD and new RAM for my laptop. It’s back to being butter smooth, but I have a hunch that cleaning the dust from the fans while I was in there was a very large factor in that haha
I mean, asterisk. Most laptops let you swap the storage and RAM and many let you swap the battery. Beyond that it usually gets difficult.
Framework let you swap everything, which is a major difference. But of course you pay for that privilege; modular design has its costs.
Still, good on you for getting a cheap upgrade. No need to throw away a perfectly good laptop if you can make it work fast again with a new SSD.
Wow that’s an amazing amount of dust. I think that’s the most I have seen in a computer and my only source of laptop used to be old things from recycling centers
Could be explained by the fact that my favorite position to program is on my bed, like a teenage girl from a mediocre 2000’s movie writing in her diary. The laptop fans get a taste of all that good good bed sheet fiber.
My back hurts thinking about this.
Ah I see you keep your laptop well fed. I try to keep mine anorexic lol
I think the issue is not having a desktop-type computer at all and having a tablet/phone that’s so locked down the kid isn’t given the opportunity to explore or troubleshoot.
Tinkering is how you learn to solve problems, which requires having something tinker-able without having to go down a hacky rabbithole.
Witnessed a radiology resident typing her password into a computer and for each uppercase letter she would press shift-lock, type the letter, then press shift-lock again.
I couldn’t figure it out until my mom pointed out she probably only ever used a phone or tablet.
Which is crazy, because I can’t imagine getting through high school, college, and medical school without ever working on a desktop computer.
I started on a commodore 64, you kids that started on a machine with a gui were coddled.
Vic-20 here. What a time to be alive.
TRS-80 then IBM PCjr here. Both hand-me-downs though.
Mom wouldn’t let me on the 386 until I could touch-type and write a program in BASIC. She was a Cobol and IBM RPG programmer.
I remember BASIC from school, on the old Acorn BBCs… good times.
I started on an Antikythera mechanism, you kids that started on a modern machine were coddled.
Apple ][e was my first. We also had an XP machine for internet (Neopets) but I didn’t have to fight for turns on the Apple.
I had an Apple ][e I could use at school. It was preferable to the ][c for the same reason.
I had a GUI - windows 3.11
But it was so slow. So I made my own gui/menu system that ran in dos. I was between 9-11 I reckon.
Not sure where that lands me on the spectrum of coddledness
Are you joking? C64 was the bomb back in the day! My Atari and Amiga mates were enjoying colors and music and games while I had sat there on my colourless, mute PC. All I had was Flight Simulator 2 in black and white. And DrBrush for drawing in Hercules “graphics” mode.
Yeah, it was just MSDOS. I saw “Abort, retry, fail” so many times, and I didn’t even know what it meant because I was four and I just wanted to play Family Feud with my brother.
Ummm how do kids turn out if you install Linux Mint on a cheap laptop and give it to them to screw around with? Asking for a friend.
My cousin became an IT tech. I set her up with Ubuntu on a cheap desktop when she was about 12.
I started on a Mac from Apple’s bad days. The school computers were Windows and it felt like all the other kids had Windows computers at home. I think feeling like I was at the disadvantage probably had an effect on me that led me to Linux. Also the second family computer ran Windows ME, so…
I started out with old Macs running System 7, and it was great. I had several good games installed from floppy disks and found some great shareware games online when we got our first modem and internet
honestly i think part of the reason i’m a computer tinkerer now is my formative years were spent trying to run specific minecraft launchers, n64 emulators and other stuff on the family mac
Yeah the mac or pc part doesn’t really matter if youre curious and like learning. You can do a lot with mac. However on the surface I would say its a little more simplified.
“discluded”
🤣
I thought so too, but turns out it is a word, even if it might be misused here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/129015/is-disclude-a-word-and-what-authority-says-a-word-is-a-word-or-isnt
We do not wish to exclude the population because it would preclude comparative analysis, but we wish to disclude them from this study in order to conclude the initial hypothesis.
the iphone was the beginning of the downfall
striping menue options down for usability and “natural gestures” like swiping caused a whole generation to be able to partake in internet discourse without having a basic understanding of how they got there
Hot take: macOS, being Unix like, fosters more tech literacy than Windows.
It’s much better now with windows terminal and winget, but a decade or so ago even basic things like installing python and adding it to PATH were infinitely easier on Unix-like environments.
For those privileged to have programming classes, the first 2-3 sessions were the teachers going round doing tech support just to install python on shitty locked down Windows laptops.
Windows being terrible makes you learn a lot of stuff, but so much of it is untransferrable.
I started with DOS. then windows. I didn’t use Linux until I was in my 20s, and not heavily use it until my 30s.
I just started using a Mac for work because it’s “Unix like”.
Mac’s are fucked up man. I don’t know how anyone gets shit done on them. the UX is developed like it’s for stroke victims with permanent brain damage.
I would rather use W11 than a Mac and I fucking loathe Microsoft and their horrible AI bullshit.
I am still using windows 10.
This. So freaking much this.
Mac is unix in the same way that Android is unix or my car’s infotainment system is Unix.
Yes, there’s unix under the hood, but there’s such a bunch of garbage on top that the unixity really doesn’t help much at all.
My trajectory was win 3.11, then macos 7 & 8, then windows 98… Windows 7 > macOS again as a dev > Linux when I finally got to pick my own software and IT wasn’t what paid the bills.
Windows was always broken so you had to learn to fix shit
Mac never did quite what you needed so you had to work around stuff and try harder
… Next/Mac got me very literate with Unix
… Linux is just kinda what I know.
But Unix based macos really is an excellent os. It’s just a shame its so locked to their hardware.
I think this is pretty reasonable and shouldn’t be a hot take. IMO, what macOS does better is to provide a simple UI that protects less experienced users well enough from themselves while keeping developer tools accessible and close enough to standard Unix stuff. It’s easy to get into but not too hard to move past the basics once you need to. In Windows, I often feel like the opposite is true. The UI is a complicated mess of three different UIs that doesn’t even protect users all that well, and developer tools are often separate products with their own learning curve that are aggressively Windows-specific.
There was a fairy large era of macs that were way more open to customization then windows. Probably still true because Microsoft has gotten a lot more aggressive about locking down their os and the average gamer has no clue how to install mods if it isn’t from the Steam workshop.
