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So I'm not just an Elder Millennial, I'm a Xennial. The last subgeneration to understand computers because they grew up as we grew up.
didyouknowfacts.com/theres-nowβ¦
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I'd like to see whether a bunch of people born in 1985-1990 understand computers enough to:
(1) download a zipped file of their choice to their Downloads folder;
(2) go to their Documents folder and create a subfolder named "[zipname]_content" ... if the zipped file was "abc.zip", then the created folder should be "abc_content";
(3) extract the zipped file's contents into their newly created folder;
(4) open a program, navigate to the folder, and open the extracted contents in that program.
I suspect that this Xennials subgroup is too narrowly drawn when thinking about computer skills. I know that most people at work younger than about 30 years old cannot do the above. I am not sure whether 30-35 year olds can do so.
I do agree that there was a big change in child rearing between 1977 kids and 1987 kids. ( For example, #sonOne and his friends could get on their bikes and go for a ride together; #sonTwo and his friends were always accompanied by someone's parent. There were also changes in how kids got to and from school. )
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@LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} Yeah, these delineations are of course arbitrary and there's no sudden cutoff. But I'm sure someone born 1990 is less likely than someone born 1985 to complete your exercise, and I suspect the cohorts 1977-1983 are about evenly likely to do it, and slightly more likely than the 1985 cohort.
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meh, no generation understands computers. An incredibly small subset of each generation understands an incredibly small subset of computers.
The difference between then and now is everyone has a few.
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@Douglas A. Whitfield Several of my non-technical friends in the 90s assembled their computer from parts and fought IRQ settings and config.sys in high school. They became veterinarians, priests and marketing consultants. Today, I bet they understand when the problem is the DNS.
Several of my below-30 engineer colleagues in the industry find this command-line concept intriguing and would like to know more. They understand testing, software architecture and programming, but not hardware and networking. They have heard the modem beep on YouTube.
I cannot make myself believe that the difference is minimal. What is included in the set of common sense and knowledge is very different between these two cohorts.