I remember how "old people" (now over 50) have had a hard time learning computers back in the 90s. "Kids these days" just don't see computers as an awesome tool that needs to be mastered and are not socialized to fight with a config.sys to play the game.
Kids in general were never 'computer-savvy,' You worked at that. Everyone just thinks kids were because they weren't scared of breaking the damn thing and so never worried if what they were doing was the right thing to do.
We worked for it hard. Reinstalling stuff, spending evenings fixing problems, frustrating games with vertical learning curves. We have the skills to remove spyware from kids' laptops but must build tools and UIs that are user friendly enough for the next generation.
In the 1980s and 90s, knowing about computers was also a way for kids to "rebel against old people". It was us who could teach our teachers how to use and program a computer, not the other way around.
That's gone now. Today, config.sys is something "old people" talk about, why would a kid learn /that/?
> In the 1980s and 90s, knowing about computers was also a way for kids to "rebel against old people".
Growing up in the 1980s, knowing about computers was actively encouraged by all the adults in my life (parents, teachers, etc.)
While some of the particular uses of that knowledge may have been rebellious, actually gaining the knowledge itself was not.
> It was us who could teach our teachers how to use and program a computer, not the other way around.
For the people for whom that was true, IME, computer knowledge often wasn't the only thing it was true about.
> That's gone now.
No, to the extent that it was true in the 1980s and 1990s, its still true now. Most adults (including most teachers) still don't know much about computers, and its seems just as common for young people to be able exceed the teachers they are likely to have at skill with programming current computers as it was in the 1980s or 1990s. And there are plenty of rebellious applications of computer-related knowledge for the young.
I remember how "old people" (now over 50) have had a hard time learning computers back in the 90s. "Kids these days" just don't see computers as an awesome tool that needs to be mastered and are not socialized to fight with a config.sys to play the game.