A study on tech literacy

Fun. I didn't grow up issuing a Mac, not did I grow up using Windows.... Nor Linux.

When I started on computers, we used DOS.

I'm old.

I'm not old enough to remember punch cards, I was solidly in the x86 generation, but still.

For the record, I do IT support now. I'm the one that helps you with your printer.

Can we stop throwing around "autistic" for anything? Have people actually ever met autistic kids? It has nothing to do about having uncommon interest, it imply much more things than that.

back in the 80's, whole rooms of Apple Computers sat empty, all day, everyday. At all the different schools i went to as a child.

I assume it's because none of the teachers wanted to learn them, it was real fucking shitty growing up surrounded by so many stupid fucks.

but now, soon, AI will be x1000000000⁷ better teachers. So at least the children will have an actual chance in this world, and so many of them won't choose liberal arts as their course of studies. -all that time they were just disciplining the children

A home-built (from a set) one-board computer counts as what?

The Picard Maneuver, inciting violence once again, I see. tips fedora

Run a second correlation on the incomes of these families and the tech literacy of their children and see what you find. I have a hypothesis.

I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?

I started on Commodore (Vic20 that I don't remember much, C64, and A500) mostly with a tiny bit of Atari and then was on Windows at home for decades (I tried installing Linux (Mandrake and Redhat) back when it fit on a floppy, but without a lot of success). I guess I'm too old and not neurotypical enough?

Is Dragon 32 a Mac or Windows computer?

The thing with Macs is you don't have to spend 80% of your time troubleshooting them. I love my Mac and OS X. I boot it up, log in, and don't have to think about it. The UI is very intuitive and easy to use as well.

I'm curious what her hypothesis is, I don't think there is a correlation at all personally, seen a ton of people who know nothing about their computers regardless of Mac/Windows as their primary os.

Should've written "Mac PCs" just to mess with people.

If you've had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.

Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆

Looking at the comments, it occurs to me that we're not a representative section of the online community.

Were literally people who went out of their way to not use a conventional/commercial tech product.

I wonder what the % of people on here is who have built a pc, used a raspberry pi or installed Linux compared to the outside world.

I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.

I grew up on Mac and only switched to Windows when I was 30. lol

I still wonder what Linux is like… It’s probably cool.

I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.

I switched to Linux after my experience with Windows Millennium Edition. Many people have since referred to me as some sort of programming genius and hacker.....I don't know crap about any of that. I've simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I've had trouble. Using the mainstream distributions (I'm guessing) has kept me from having much trouble.

I think my kids may benefit, as my wife only uses Mac, I have 2 Ubuntus and a Mint, and the kids use Chromebooks at school. We have 2 iPad and a Galaxy tab in the house. 1 kid has an Android phone and the other an iPhone. My wife and I both have flagship Android phones.

Sometimes it's fun to watch them debate over which systems they prefer, depending on the school projects they work on.

My first experience with Linux was at 10 years old or so. I had a netbook that I'd installed Ubuntu on.

Flash forward nearly 14 years and I use Arch as pretty much a daily driver these days.

Omg, this is the best early-morning laugh that I've had in a long time. Mac-nerd, here. From childhood. Also a Linux nerd for servers. This is so great that I immediately sent it to friends in tech. I'm still laughing like a nut.

I used MacOS for a bit, switched to Windows, then when I was 15 I installed Linux :3

Granted I do very much have autism

my favorite pornotrope is how people still swear by the belief that apple computers suffer no "malware", because why are androids apparently so promiscuous like any black person wants to spoof torvalds' github username

do androids sleep with promiscuous scapegoats?

Discluded? Are you sure you don't mean excounted?

Linux users are inherently more tech savvy because there are no limits. On the contrary, there is documentation and free knowledge aplenty. Windows and especially Mac hide and obfuscate everything happening under the hood and you are vaguely warned away from doing anything not specifically blessed by the corporation. That's why those users are less tech savvy on average.

I'm currently training a new employee who comes from the "My school handed out Chromebooks" generation, and hol...eee...shit... Its frustrating as hell.

Literally every single instruction gets followed up with "no...double click"

FML

Year of birth matters a lot for this experiment.

Macintosh versus some IBM (or clone) running MS DOS is a completely different era than Windows Vista versus PowerPC Macs, which was a completely different era from Windows Store versus Mac App Store versus something like a Chromebook or iPad as a primary computing device.

I suddenly vividly remember putting my mom’s Chromebook into developer mode and installing crouton on it so I could play Minecraft.

Tbf installing linux is not that hard

I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It's not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.

I grew up with mac, but I was always so frustrated that I couldn't play the games and run the programs my friends could on their computers. I finally bought my own PC in high school, and was so happy to have the control I always wanted. I haven't switched to Linux yet, but at this point it's inevitable; I'm just dragging my feet on figuring it out.

My father made me figure out how to compile Linux drivers for a modem card before I could have internet.

My family’s first computer was a 68k Mac, specifically a Quadra 605. I tried (and failed) to teach myself C++ using that system at the tender age of 9, but eventually moved over to Windows PCs. Had a Linux-based web server running on spare parts as a teen, though, and did succeed at teaching myself PHP and later Python well enough to hack together my very own blog software. Not very good blog software, mind you, but the critical thing was that it worked! Even spent a few years as and SMB sysadmin even though my degree is in [building] architecture.

Since then I’ve drifted away from the very deep end of tech world, but I would never say that first Macintosh stunted my skill.

(100% autistic tho, so ymmv)

Mac not being able to play any games forced me to mess around with other operating systems on it

I played education games on a Apple II in 1998; I was in the first grade.

I started on a Mac and now I'm an IT expert.

But that's because my next computer was a Dell.

Dislike the idea that only autistic people use linux.

Some people are just naturally computer savvy. My class and I were taught on how to use command prompt, but only few of us could get it. We just wanted to play Command and Conquer and DOTA, and leave the tweaking to the nerds.

My schools had this growing up. The old single button Macs(I remember this game too).

We didn’t have a computer in our house until I was ~8. It was blistering quick 400Mhz machine running windows…(Good ol’ slot load processors).

But the time I was ~11 I had built my own computer. Mother was kind enough to take a leap of faith and set a budget for the project. My parents are absolutely not tech people. So they had no idea what I was doing and could offer no assistance other than monetary. It worked out in the end though.

I work in the tech industry and I’ve had windows boxes, and even a few MacBook pros for work. We deploy stuff to Linux and windows. I have dual Xeon servers running Linux in the basement.

Was taught using Apple2 then Macs in Jr High.

I built my own PC in high school (late 90s), upgraded it through college, then switched back to Mac’s when they went Intel.

I can’t muddle through Ruby, Python, Perl, Php C/C++, Objective-C and Swift. But wrote Actionscript, JS, and HTML/CSS for a living for 15 years.

How you start doesn’t matter and Mac’s are still better than Chromebooks. They have Unix shells FFS.

Started on Mac. Still use one as my (not so-) daily driver. In the ~30 years in between, I've (professionally) been a PC field service technician, mainframe operator, datacenter tech, enterprise monitoring administrator, and a whole slew of other tech hats. In my personal time, I learned OS 7-8 inside and out (ResEdit ftw), built PCs out of spare parts (throwing Linux on some just to do it), turned an old tower into an external SCSI enclosure, built VM stacks for fun (DOS 6.2, Win 3.1, Win95 all on the same Mac box decades ago, just because I could), half-wired my parents' house for ethernet, built them a Hackintosh from parts, stuck a Linux VM on an old laptop to host Citrix so I could remote into work and have that one extra layer between personal and business, and gotten completely disillusioned with tech as a hobby and as the framework for modern society.

I started on a Mac, and now I live as a nomadic caveman, never contacting the civilized world.

Can confirm. Started on a Mac. Was using terminal, hex editor, resource forks, and squirrel basic to modify my Catz installation before I was 10. Windows peers seemed to think computers were made of rainbows and unicorns