When I was six years old, my dad brought a computer home from work. It had Windows 3.1 on it. I had to learn how to use the DOS command prompt in order to play my favorite game, Q-bert. When I was a teenager, a new computer of middling quality could run north of $3000 from the Best Buy. But my friends introduced me to a catalog where I could buy the parts to assemble one from scratch. They let me borrow their copy of Windows 95 to install. Then we all had to learn how to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, or how to build out a LAN network to play games together in person. We took classes in touch-typing at school, using the computer lab. I went to computer camp during the summer. I went to college and took more advanced classes on programing.

I have spent tens of thousands of hours learning to use the computer, practically from the inception of the PC to the modern day.

Now my friends have kids, and I talk about how they use the computer. Everything is out-of-the-box. Installing something is as simply as clicking an icon. You can buy a mini-computer off the shelf for under $200 and it runs better than anything I could have built thirty years ago. Periodically, they will come to me with a more advanced computer program, which has to do with a very particular OS configuration or some weird networking bug that only someone with 10+ years of experience would think to look for. I typically find the answer online, because I don't remember it off the top of my head. I teach the kid and the kid learns, and then the kid knows as much as I do on that particular subject.

In twenty years, I'm sure they'll know more than me, just because I'll be retired and they'll be in the thick of it.

Also, please nobody ask me how a car works. That was something my parents' generation learned. I'm clueless.

Yes. We are.

We are young with to have learned tech at an early age, but old enough that the tech wasn't user friendly when we were kids, so we needed to understand it better than people do in the smartphone generation.

Installing a new game on my PC in high school was a multi-hour, sometimes multi-day ordeal.

Plugging in a secondary hard drive involved putting jumpers on pins to keep the system from trying to boot off it.

Assigning ports on peripherals involved understanding how to count in binary so you could assign addresses on dip switches.

Installing a printer involved unholy alliances with formless beings.

Every 2-3 years, I still wake up wearing black robes in a strange room in Romania, blood on my hands and a lingering scent of cordite in the air. I'm fairly certain that's related to the Canon BJC driver issues I had upgrading my AST to Windows 95.

It’s funny because we always thought that the next generation’s technical knowledge would utterly eclipse ours, but instead they only know how to edit a short video to seem to loop infinitely.

I literally just watched a video of a dude telling a story about how when he was 13 in 2012, his Xbox 360 controller stopped working and he thought the whole console broke when he just had to replace the controller batteries. 🤣

iOS is literally designed for toddlers to be able to use it. "iPad kids" aren't especially gifted, "iPad adults" are especially stupid.

But on the bright side, those same groups think they "know computers" because they can press large, brightly colored buttons - so they walk around with unearned confidence in their abilities and impatience/lack of appreciation for the people that actually have to fix things.

It's also why a large swatch of these same fucking idiot, drains on humanity loudly challenge the validity of voting tech infrastructure without any factual basis to their argument - they just "feel" like they get it.

Kids don't even understand file structures because modern OSs obfuscate that stuff.

I fix my parents’ computers. I fix the computers of the super old people in the neighborhood. I fix my kid’s computer. I fix my friends’ computers.

I don’t think it’s generational.

When your car breaks down, do you fix it? At what point do you take it to a mechanic?

At what point do you call an electrician or plumber? Who biopsies their own cysts?

It’s all the same shit. We live in a society of specialists because there’s simply too much potential knowledge for everyone to be able to do everything.

And if we start arguing about what things people “ought to be able to do themselves”, we turn into a bunch of old farts lamenting about the good old days.

We are the bridge generation.

We know and saw a world without the internet and we experienced it when it first came to be.

We saw the first mass produced computers and computer devices which broke often, didn't work the way we wanted them to, they weren't fast and they didn't have much memory in any way. We were the first generation to see all this. Our parents were too old and busy to figure it out but we were young enough to be curious about it all. We also kept wanting to have the newest fastest hardware and software so we had no choice but to either buy, beg or steal these things to get them. We learned to swap parts, add parts, remove parts, install an OS, uninstall the OS, run backups, store data and learn it all on our own because there was no easy internet social media community to help you. Software was constantly changing and we had to keep up by either buying expensive titles or we learned about Linux and open source software or we became digital pirates or both.

Now the digital landscape has changed. Younger generations prefer handheld devices so to them everything is solid state ... they never can imagine changing the RAM, HDD, SSD, CPU, GPU or the PSU or even bothering to learn what those things are. Because everything is built in and no one (or very few) people bother with fixing or tinkering with anything. There are fewer people who learn about software and about how or where to find it, install it, configure it and run it. To new generations who only know the digital world through locked devices, there was less incentive to learn or even have access to know how these things worked.

We are the bridge generation. We got to see the world without the internet and the world with one. No one before us got to see what we saw, no one after us will experience what we went through. Our civilization dramatically changed during our lifetime and we got a front row seat.