As an anecdote, the summer after I graduated kindergarten I worked very hard to learn to tie my own shoes, because I didn't want to be the only student in first grade who couldn't tie his own shoes.
When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.
> they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.
I'm really curious what people mean when they say that. I didn't grow up with smart screens, but I've never felt particularly encumbered by them, and I wouldn't even consider using them a skill. What does the difference between a "bad iPad user" and a "good iPad user" really amount to? Is swiping Tiktok and watching Youtube really something you can become proficient in?
How is it any different than being proficient with a regular computer? Or any other tool? They're fast at typing, they know where the settings are, they can get around using muscle memory instead of needing to examine every screen to see where things are, etc etc.
In gaming, there's the terms "skill floor" and "skill ceiling" to describe a game's capacity for handling user adeptness. A low skill floor means anyone can play with low requirements, and a high skill floor means it demands a lot from the player. Low skill ceiling means that it takes very little time to reach the peak skill level, while a high skill ceiling means it can take years of play before taking full advantage of the tools it gives you.
Tablets seem to have a low skill floor and low skill ceiling by design. There's no file system, they can't run unsigned code, they can't write code, and are essentially just internet media players.
A PC has a somewhat low skill floor as well (as any mass consumer product should), but the skill ceiling is very very high. A confident user can also easily break something essential.
Regular computers have less handrails and you can hose yourself.
Back in the day even a 12 year old needed to at least sometimes poke around autoexec.bat so some understanding as to why things are happening was necessary.
I have been using an iPad for years and every fucking time I accidentally trigger the creation of a second window I have to flail around for a while before I can figure out how to get rid of it. Presumably there are people who deliberately create multiple windows on these things and actually do serious enough work on them that this is useful, "my experiences with trying to ditch my lappy for 100% ipad" is definitely a genre of blog post.
I don't have a "multitasking" section in "home screen & dock". Possibly because I have an old ipad that constantly fails to update past 15.7 for some damn reason. Guess I get to keep cursing this feature.
Interesting take. My son is in this summer right now. He can’t tie his shoes yet but can whistle pretty well. My passing theory on shoes, as opposed to my 80s experience, is twofold. First, the end of unstructured/unsupervised play outside means he’s rarely/never been in a circumstance where an adult hasn’t been near enough to tie them for him. Second, has to do with shoes themselves. I feel like no tie/velcro shoes didn’t exist past toddler sizes when I was young. Maybe they did but I’m sure they were severely limiting compared to the options available today. He’s even been using the pre-tied elastic laces for last year or more, I don’t remember those at all when I was a kid. I remember Velcro was a something a bully might target you for so most kids wanted out of them asap back then.
His need of this skill is lower than mine.
Another example is bike riding. I was all over my neighborhood by first grade and BMX was a dominant hobby. My son has practically zero interest in even learning how to ride. There’s no FOMO of his friends leaving him in the dust like when I was a kid.
I don't know much about COBOL, but I did code quite a bit in Fortran. In Fortran, the first five columns were for an optional line number, so these would mostly be blank. The sixth column was a flag that indicated that the line was continued from the one before, this allowed for multiline statements, by default a carriage return was a statement terminator. Like you said, all this came from punch cards.
I think about the quote that "Only Nixon could go to China" and maybe there's a corollary that "Only Clinton could balance the budget". Similar to how Nixon had the anti-commie credentials to be able visit Mao's China, Clinton had the liberal credentials to be able to cut social spending. I don't think that the budget surplus that Clinton left us was all due to social spending cuts, but he did make significant cuts.
When COBOL came out it was hyped as ending the need for software developers because it looked sorta like normal English, however it still required someone to be able to think like a programmer. The need to be able to think like a developer is somewhat reduced, but I don't see it totally going away.
I recalling my experience with newspaper archives in college. It's thirty been years since I was in college, but I assume that libraries still have some kind of copy of newspaper articles onsite, or do they?
Back then there were microfiche scans. I assume they're not making new microfiche scans, but do they have scans of old newspapers available on a computer? If you want to do primary source research for a history term paper how do you do it?
Those microfiches have been digitised and OCR'd while newspapers from the 90's onwards were created digitally and as such are archived in some processed source form - PDF or similar.
Here's a list of newspaper archives containing such material:
When my kids went into first grade around ten years ago, they couldn't tie their own shoes, but if they had been able to, they would have been about the only kids in their grade who could. Also, very few kids nowadays can whistle compared to when I was a kid. My kids didn't have as much access to screens as a lot of kids do, but they and their peers were fairly proficient with tablets, etc.