So I was born in '96. We actually used our elementary school PCs less than younger years because not as much work had been digitized yet, plus it wasn't a given that every student had internet at home. iPhones became hot 2009-2012 when I was in middle school (gen1 iPhone/iPt was too early), but everyone needed a PC at home for schoolwork, same in high school. We were fortunate enough to have a computer science class, which literally 10X'd in popularity the year after I took it. Later years also used laptops more for non-CS stuff.
PC games were mainstream too, so it wasn't just work. Really hit me when the school jocks started joining my Minecraft server. Again I think consoles were actually more popular in earlier times, cause PCs couldn't run as many good games until the 2010s.
I can't speak as much for the younger side of gen Z. I assume CS is still more popular among them, there are more PC video gamers than before, and there are Chromebooks if you count that. Not sure if iPads ever actually replaced PCs, besides it was always in Apple's interest not to cannibalize the Mac line.
I don't really count chromebooks because it's an OS that does a LOT to hide the details of how computers work from the end user. That's sort of where I see the computer illiteracy coming from. Android and iOS both do a lot to try and hide away what computers are behind nice app icons.
Even the rise of needing computers/internet access to do homework has sort of worked against learning how computers work. It's all bubble wrapped to hide away the nitty gritty details.
And I'm not actually even saying this is a bad thing. It's just that the way you work with a computer is very different than it was for me. By the time you were exposed a lot of things had already been very simplified.
Just to give you an idea of what I mean by that.
For me to install a game on my old DOS computer, I had to work with potentially multiple 3.5 floppy disks. I'd run `cd A:\` to get to the A drive where the floppy resided. From there I'd run `dir \w` to get a list of the files on the floppy disk. I'd be on the lookout for a `SETUP.EXE` or `INSTALL.EXE` file to start the install process. From there, the installation prompt would ask me a bunch of questions about my computer things like "What sort of sound card do you have"? "What is the IRQ port for your card"? "Do you have a VooDoo Graphics card"? "Where do you want to install this game (We recommend C:\DOOM)"?
After some whirring and clicking the install would be complete and we'd have to `cd C:\DOOM` and run `DOOM.EXE`. There we'd run the executable and... shoot, I put in the wrong sound sound card, the wrong port, etc. It's at that point we'd have to diagnose the problem, maybe modify an .ini file. All from reading the manuals and past experience.
It's that sort of experience that I have which made me intimately familiar with concepts like file systems and disk partitions. Familiar with random parts of a computer in ways that were vastly simplified. I mean, for example, I had to do things like installing new GPU drivers to make some games work properly. I couldn't just trust windows update to grab a relatively up to date (or even the correct) driver.
That said, I'm 1000% sure your CS class was WAY better than my intro to programming. The resources I had for programming were really bad. It was a lot of self taught effort.
With this Mac in front of me, am I really digging into technical details more than on a Chromebook or iPhone? Taking away the iTerm2 window on the other screen (since not everyone is a programmer), all I've got is a web browser, calendar, and mail. In the OS X Tiger and WinXP days, probably the same plus iChat/AIM and MS Word. The trickiest thing was maybe saving a Word doc to a USB stick, which is still easier than using Google Drive.
Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.
> Old stuff that required command lines was harder, but I think that was niche and very few people understood it.
And this is why I'm telling you that millennials were more computer literate :D.
We grew up when this old stuff that required command lines was the norm. Maybe you had to be there.
The user experience drastically improved in pretty much every way as I got older. My first computer was DOS which is just a command line. Imagine doing everything through iTerm2 and that's how I and a fair number of millennials (particularly older millennials) interacted with computers.
Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 weren't much more than wrappers over dos. For a lot of programs you'd install (Doom for example, but also games like Warcraft and Warcraft II) you still had to do a lot of the work I described above to get them functional.
From a windows perspective it really wasn't until windows XP or so that things became as smooth as you experienced. Everything before that was DEEPLY exposing nearly every aspect of how a computer worked to the end user.
Mac was a bit different, it was always somewhat easier to use than Windows was. However, I and most of my friends dealt primarily with windows machines because that's where the games were all at (and they were cheaper for the hardware you got).
My generation was the one where computers became cheap enough that everyone had one, yet still ran software written primarily for more technical computer people. OS and software devs spent literally decades polishing the UX by the time the first Gen Zers rolled around.
So the average millennial actually used a PC regularly for these things? When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990, which is about what I expected. But then there's school and libraries.
> When I look online, I see something like only 15% of households had a PC in 1990
Millennials go from 80 to 95. The oldest millennials were 9 at 1990. Just 5 years later, 1995, household computers rose to 39% in the US.
For most millennials that boom in computers happened right at their formative years. The millennials were also driving a lot of it. Parents got computers for their kids.
> I don't really count chromebooks because it's an OS that does a LOT to hide the details of how computers work from the end user. That's sort of where I see the computer illiteracy coming from. Android and iOS both do a lot to try and hide away what computers are behind nice app icons
Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs on ChromeOS. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.
> I don't really count chromebooks because it's an OS that does a LOT to hide the details of how computers work from the end user. That's sort of where I see the computer illiteracy coming from. Android and iOS both do a lot to try and hide away what computers are behind nice app icons
Crostini allows for full-blown Linux VMs. I would have killed for a click-to-reinstall Linux sandbox in my childhood.
Gen Z starts around 95. The ipod touch came out in 07. That means that the hot device to get came out when the oldest Gen Z turned 12.
I'd grant that older genz were probably more exposed, but that exposure and familiarity pretty rapidly decreases as they age.