[TUHS] Re: "9 skills our grandkids won't have" - Is this a TUHS topic?

A fun one: Using folders. People in their early 20s and younger - mostly those who grew up with iPhones, Androids and Ipads - didn't interact with filesystems. Instead, they grew up using apps that handled storage for them. When they wanted a video, they were looking for it in a streaming app, and they used the app's search function. If they were looking at photos, it was much the same. Because of this, as hard as it is to believe, they don't really grok the concept - and this keeps popping up, to my delight. It initially popped into my field of view last year, when an astro professor was running into trouble with undergrad students. The professor was asking the students to put certain data into certain folders, but the students fundamentally didn't understand what "putting certain data in certain folders" meant: https://twitter.com/saavikford/status/1425235201047908359 I love this quote from the professor, though unfortunately the tweet prompting it was deleted. The professor was asked something like "do the students not understand how drawers work?" Her response was, "They fail to grasp that the idea of drawers themselves might exist. Because they have a perfectly valid system of a laundry basket and a robot that retrieves exactly the sock they want when they want it (as I'm finally figuring out). Or something like that, anyway." And this continues to pop up - I saw a reddit thread the other day that brought up entry-level computer science students who are coming in not understanding folders at all. It's being added to the list of abstractions that most people don't interact with day-to-day anymore, and which must be explained. With that said, I have a friend my age (30s) who enjoys bringing up their conviction that the Zoomers are correct, and hierarchical filesystems should go the way of the dinosaur - with searchability/tagging being the correct way to handle storage. That could also be a fun discussion for the ML. One other fun note for the prompt. Someone noted that, working at an apple store, they kept seeing young people use the caps lock key even when just typing the first letter of the sentence; it then clicked that this is closest to how phone keyboards work, and is likely where they got the muscle memory from. Hope you're all having a nice morning, Marshall On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 9:40 AM Marc Donner &lt;marc.donner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Programming an 026 skip card. Inserting the skip card. > Using ed in kernel safe mode to fix a broken config file. > Threading a half-inch tape in a tape drive. Remembering to insert or remove the write ring. > Cleaning floppy disk heads. > Manually keying a boot program into an SDS-930. > ===== > nygeek.net > mindthegapdialogs.com/home > > > On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 9:14 AM steve jenkin &lt;sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au&gt; wrote: >> What are the 1970’s & 1980’s Computing / IT skills “our grandkids won’t have”? >> >> Whistling into a telephone while the modem is attached, because your keyboard has a stuck key >> - something I absolutely don’t miss. >> >> Having a computer in a grimy wharehouse with 400 days of uptime & wondering how a reboot might go? >> >> steve j >> >> ========= >> >> 9 Skills Our Grandkids Will Never Have >> <https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/06/9-skills-our-grandkids-will-never-have/> >> >> 1: Using record players, audio cassettes, and VCRs >> 2: Using analog phones [ or an Analog Clock ] >> 3. Writing letters by hand and mailing them >> 4. Reading and writing in cursive >> 5. Using manual research methods [ this is a Genealogy site ] >> 6. Preparing food the old-fashioned way >> 7. Creating and mending clothing >> 8. Building furniture from scratch >> 9. Speaking the languages of their ancestors >> >> -- >> Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design >> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) >> PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA >> >> mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin >>