They grew up playing video games. When I was a kid funds were so scarce I barely got a C64 and a tape deck. Had to program my own games.
“They grew up playing video games. When I was a kid funds were so scarce I barely got a C64 and a tape deck. Had to program my own games.”
I would expect gen Xers, particularly men, to be very good at computing. I was older and got my first computer and terminal in the 70’s, which I had to build and solder myself and even then the parts were barely within my reach.
I find many, but not all, of my boomer age cohorts to be amazingly inept with technology.
Programming your own games gave you at least the basics (no pun intended) of how computer programs worked. Twenty years ago we did not program our own games but we made mods. Bunches of them. And little tweaks to start menus and custom sounds when certain programs were activated.
Now they just buy them and if it is not available they will not even attempt to make it.
Honestly the myth that kids are so "tech savvy" is just that, a myth. Some kids do indeed know how to use technology but most just dully watch videos.
I’ve seen Zoomers, 9 or 10 years old, playing video games who couldn’t understand the in-game instructions because they still couldn’t read. There is just something wrong with this generation. Even their cartoons, compared to what I remember as a kid, are inferior and dumber.
I grew up on video games and was reading on my own, according to my mother, by the time I was 3 years old. She told me I taught myself how to use our old Apple Works computer. I remember treating the floppy disks like they were mystical in some way, playing games, and making word documents and saving them to empty floppies. Probably by the time I was 12 years old, I had already been typing, with lighting speed, with both hands, a skill that still impresses Zoomer co-workers and Boomer bosses at the law firm (the Zoomers can’t even type).
Soon after that was the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and then PC gaming all the way to adulthood, playing games like Starfleet Command, Star Trek: Klingon Academy, the Thief series, etc.
I credit gaming with the reason why I’m so good at solving problems on my own, whether its a technical problem or just a general life problem.
From Compute! magazine?