TheJen will not complyMay 8

Folks are gonna need to stop with the "grandma on the computer" to mean uneducated users tropes soon.

I was writing and debugging code to a cassette tape drive before a lot of folks who say this nonsense were even born. I have built my own computers from the case up. My first computer class in college was COBOL. I hard coded websites before there were any tools to do it with.

I'm 52.

What I find is that most of the yunguns have no fucking idea how they work and couldn't find a command line if their life depended on it.

So, yanow, maybe stop.

Show threadSteve Bellovin5d ago
@TheJen @cstross A long-time friend's mother was a computer programmer—on the Univac I…
Show threadCharlie Stross5d ago
@SteveBellovin @TheJen If my wife and I had kids (we don't) they'd be 4th generation. (Her paternal granddad worked with Tommy Flowers on the Manchester Mk.1 after doing something undisclosed for the military during the War; her dad followed him into ICL.)
Show threadChris Samuel5d ago
@SteveBellovin @TheJen @cstross oh wow, that’s serious pedigree. IIRC TF designed Colossus and earlier did a lot of the Tunny work at BP too?
Show threadCharlie Stross5d ago
@chris_bloke @SteveBellovin @TheJen Yes, but grandpa-in-law was a former GPO telephone engineer (presumably drafted by GCHQ) and I never met him.
Show threadBill Ricker

@cstross @chris_bloke @SteveBellovin @TheJen

Cool!

My Mom was a part of Dartmouth's trial-run of their first BASIC class, they having drafted in any non-professorial staff that were STEM-ish; she also sat in on the trial of a revised Statistics class. All before I was born, mid 1950s.

May 11 at 9:23pmWeb
Show threadBill Ricker4d ago

@cstross @chris_bloke @SteveBellovin @TheJen

Mom got a home computer in the early 1980. She gave me a very tight budget for a portable _and_ printer, so Osborne O-1 it was, that's what she could afford for Dissertation support for her return-for-terminal-degree. She's 93, so not taking on new technology now.

(Dad eventually got used to Word Star and dot-matric printer since it could cut ditto and mimeo masters for school use, and was not happy with eventual transition to MS WINDOWS!)