@TheJen
I was late to the computer party so only experienced swapping ICL mainframe disks and loading tape drives while writing COBOL for a living, but hey at 64 I think I can find my way round a PC without assistance from some young person.

Tbf on the younger lot, they interact with computers in a different way - via handheld touch screens - so a mouse n keyboard is pretty odd for them.

@TheJen

When I was a youngster writing my first programs I keyed in the machine language code on a hex keypad and saved the program on paper tape with a machine that made holes in the right places ;-)

Later I upgraded to cassette tape storage!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

@TheJen

Thank you for sharing this on Mother's Day. I have always known that "make it so that your wife/mother/grandmother could understand it" was misogynistic bullshit, because my own mother wrote mainframe software.

http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.html

But for those men who still don't get it, maybe they need it explained in a way that is inclusive of their level of maturity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

@TheJen Wrote my first programme (English spelling!) in PL/1 in 1969. Learned 360/Assembler in 1970. Modified IBM operating systems to make them faster. Later somehow drifted into management, consulting, sales training so lost touch with the bits and bytes.

You are so right about the current generation, though. None of them know the difference between a feature and a benefit. Which is why so much software now is loaded with features which bring me no benefit. And don't get me started on UIs...

@TheJen

I resemble many of those remarks - and I guess we both know more than those who spout the "grandma/grandpa" nonsense.

Yes, I remember using a cassette too!

@TheJen

i tend to use "non techy CEO". :)

@TheJen It's a generational thing AND a sexist thing.

I'm GenX. My generation did tech support for our parents and grandparents AND for our kids. The experiences of OUR youth created the "grandma's browser has a billion search bars" stereotype, because a lot of our grandparents DID click every single pop-up.

But now that we're entering the grandparent age, we're still the technomancers we've always been, so the stereotype no longer fits.

And also, women were always at the forefront of tech.

@TheJen my mom, who would be a grandmother now, spent much of her life as a professional developer. She brought home a copy of a development environment not needed at work (wrong system) for me to learn on.

She was amazing and a much more skilled programmer and computer user than many people I've met.

@TheJen last i hears of my grandmother (+80 years) she was still on the top 10 of national charts in that one bubbleshooter game and spending a lot of time in the internet, especially facebook.

she has moved to a facility in between here, i hope she was allowed to bring her computer with her.

@TheJen Almost 60 here, and yes... I've been programming since I was 15, professionally since I was 23.

And my late Mom was happily using a Linux machine until her death at 89. Though to be fair, I installed and managed that for her.

(A bit surprised you learned COBOL in college being only 52... I had no idea they taught COBOL into the 90s...)

My language odyssey went something like: BASIC and 6809 Assembler (self-taught); Pascal, FORTRAN, C (University); C++ (self-taught) and a bunch more.

@TheJen 57 here, and same. I've been using personal computers since the first TRS-80 showed up at our local Radio Shack store, got my own Atari 800 with a whopping 10K of ROM and 48K of RAM and a cassette drive in 1981.

I've been on the Internet (and using UNIX) since 1986, when I went to Carnegie-Mellon, about a decade before the public even knew it existed, and by the time they did in the mid-90s, I had founded what so far as I am aware was the first 100% broadband end-user ISP in the US.