UK English teaching was awful in the '70s & '80s. Your Dad was right, Mr Dabbs. I know loads of people who had to re-educate themselves later on. To catch up on all the stuff they failed to tell us about! I learnt more about English from my French tutor than from 10 years at school. Bs for Eng Lang & Eng Lit 'O' Levels meant NOTHING.
Some of my younger colleagues could read a long technical article on a screen with comprehension, whereas I had to print it out and scribble on it. OTOH, they were old enough to be impressed when I told them I started doing serious computing on a VAX running BSD UNIX bearing license number 2. FWIW, I had my first greengage experience a year or so ago, from a jam in a jar. I still don't know what they look like in the immature state.
I remember a few years ago we had a power problem and ended up with all the doors to the building infrastructure open, the number of apparently intelligent people who were shocked to find that huge wiring cabinets allowed them to work, even worse was when we opened up the floor to find a faulty connector.
Mind you about 7-8 years ago I had a manager say they wanted the building without any wired infrastructure we had to explain that the ip phones didn’t work without power and certainly not over wireless…..
Mar 10, 2023·edited Mar 10, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Ah, Alistair, you really do know how to press all of the right buttons for those of us 'who were there at the time'
It would appear that alongside not learning reading, writing and arithmetic, not learning how to use Google et al has become 'the next big thing' for the yoof of today. It will be interesting to see how LLM systems cope with people that can neither read, write nor speak in sentences.
The upside of this is, of course, that our talents (being able and willing to think) and knowledge (actually knowing stuff without needing an internet connection) will be eminently marketable commodities well into our dotages should we so wish, which is no bad thing considering the parlous state of our pension plans.
Mar 10, 2023·edited Mar 10, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
"Other tasks they find overwhelmingly challenging"
Hey, don't get me started on having to set up a Ring doorbell system (again).
It all began when I disabled UPnP on my router, because (I think) it kept telling the ports I'd forwarded to close down for some reason around the same time every day, and so my streaming birdbox camera stopped... well, streaming. That prompted the Ring system to go offline.
I was dreading it, because of how much of a faff it had been the first time. God, how I hate Wi-Fi devices. And I wasn't disappointed, because it was an even bigger faff this time, letting you get about 9/10ths of the way through the ten-minute long process (for each of the doorbell, and two chimes), before throwing up one of those chintzy 'Ooops' messages favoured by the modern generation that don't actually tell you what went wrong, just that something did. About eight times, in total, across three days because I couldn't be arsed and didn't want to be tempted to smash the thing with a hammer.
Simply hitting 'reconnect' is as useless as the 'Ooops' message, as it fails every time anyway, which is why I went for a complete reinstall.
FINALLY, the doorbell connected with no problems, the first chime after only four failed attempts, and the last one first time.
I used to see the current Viscount Gage quite often when I was a teenager in the 1970's . At that time he was the Honourable Nicky Gage and was a slightly disheveled character, very posh but rather poor. He had a long time to wait before inheriting his title. His ancestor William, 2nd Viscount Gage bought the greengage to Britain.
My mum (mid-80s), my children (nearly 7), and my wife (somewhere between the two😁) are all terrified to do anything with devices for the same reason - ot might not do what's expected. Mum and wife (to a lesser extent) I can understand - they grew up with switches that did just one thing. There was a certainty to what would happen (light-switch in one position - off; opposite position - on). Now, with switches that do something different depending on how long you press them - some periods being very small (Kobo, I'm looking at you...), have no tactile feedback, do completely different things if another button is (or isn't) pressed, need constant monitoring of a screen to know what's happening, etc, they are afraid to break something if they venture outside the half-a-dozen basic things they always do.
(Maybe I don't help as much as I should - I've thought once or twice that "<Sigh> what have you done this time?" isn't the best way to build confidence!)
Youths seem to have lost curiosity about how things work. My eldest - still teen - daughter works part-time as 1st-line IT support for a big company that gave her specific training and is quite proficient in helping users doing their jobs, knows how to handle VPN errors, ActiveDirectory configurations and whatnot.
But outside work she couldn't even use our home networked printer without my help... it just needs connecting without additional authentication!
"I had, myself, been born in the official final year of the Baby Boom" ah me too... My dad was an English major, and French minor at University. I may not know all of the names for all the tenses and corresponding rules, but I sure as hell know when someone "got" a "klinker" in their sentence🙄
My boy is going on 13, (don't get out your calculators, I was 46 when he was born) and was the one to show me how to make a new folder in iOS... Perhaps he'll not contract the Why Syndrome?? And I doubt he's heard a song that was released after 1990...
Recently, I was helping a young ("less than 25-year-old") colleague by means of a remote Teams session and I realised (heard) she was typing capitals using the Caps Lock as a toggle, i.e. <Caps>A<caps><Caps>L<caps><Caps>P<caps>ha to get ALPha.
I was shocked/surprised/bemused in equal measure. So I asked how she entered ! $ % and she explained that she used the 'big key' on the right of the keyboard, i.e. the right shift key. A quick explanation later and she was blaming the keyboard for not having Aa Bb written on the keys to help her! But ultimately happy to have learnt this 'new hack' from me....
On reflection, it is not surprising if you've grown up typing on an 2" wide iPhone keyboard. The idea of pressing two keys together even with the dexterity of small fingers (let alone touch-typing!) means tapping 'lock-letter-lock' is much easier and more reliable and something I should use....
I grew up in Scotland and being called ‘a tube’ was an insult (I think it had something to do with a man’s dangly bits), we’d shout, ‘Oi, you tube!’
When my boss asks me to watch some patronising micro learning training video, which I know I won’t learn anything from, I still go “you tube!” …but he thinks it’s a question and replies, ‘no it’s on our LMS’ - the tube!
Oh hell. By the time I’ve explained that in my day I’d buy hardware and physically assemble it into a working system with nothing more than a Philips screwdriver and a few hours of time required to setup the operating system it’s clear that the dumbification (yes, I’m making up a new word aged 52) of IT has a lot to answer for.
‘Friendly’ error messages on the screen, user interface decisions that change physical layouts into similar but dissimilar layouts of physical keyboards, or Sky Q and Powerline devices that take my 30+ years of experience and make me feel like that ‘It’ll just work’ statement I made just before I started setting things up wasn’t the smartest thing I’d said that day.
To generations of users who just buy a new phone when they run out of room for their 100’s of apps, or can’t devote time to cleaning up their 9,000 photos, or understand the difference between free 5GB storage in Apple iCloud and your local phone storage which has 25GB free space but cannot send more photos to iClouds because it’s full. These are the people who haven’t had to make do and mend, or deal with hours of troubleshooting, so their attention is drawn elsewhere and their knowledge is more Love Island than WiFi standards, or unclear understanding why an iPad stops syncing with a Fitbit even when they are within feet of each other.
You say "Subsequent updates on the Xerox Alto concept over the remainder of that decade added a mouse as a pointing device ..." but https://history-computer.com/xerox-alto-guide/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto agree with my recollection that it had one from the start. I'm interested if you're sure? PS The Ethernet might well have been an add-on.
Got to agree about Printers being the worst, they always have been. Great honking dot matrix ones that you had to feed paper (or payslips, carbon paper) etc
Inkjets that continuously block.
Modern ones that do absolutely everything, except you need to login to the damn things with your very long user name and password to "pull" the document from some cloud, even though you only sit a few feet away from.
The only ones I liked were the mid-era LaserJets (4, 5) that just got on with doing the job, relatively quickly and quietly.
UK English teaching was awful in the '70s & '80s. Your Dad was right, Mr Dabbs. I know loads of people who had to re-educate themselves later on. To catch up on all the stuff they failed to tell us about! I learnt more about English from my French tutor than from 10 years at school. Bs for Eng Lang & Eng Lit 'O' Levels meant NOTHING.
Some of my younger colleagues could read a long technical article on a screen with comprehension, whereas I had to print it out and scribble on it. OTOH, they were old enough to be impressed when I told them I started doing serious computing on a VAX running BSD UNIX bearing license number 2. FWIW, I had my first greengage experience a year or so ago, from a jam in a jar. I still don't know what they look like in the immature state.
I remember a few years ago we had a power problem and ended up with all the doors to the building infrastructure open, the number of apparently intelligent people who were shocked to find that huge wiring cabinets allowed them to work, even worse was when we opened up the floor to find a faulty connector.
Mind you about 7-8 years ago I had a manager say they wanted the building without any wired infrastructure we had to explain that the ip phones didn’t work without power and certainly not over wireless…..
Ah, Alistair, you really do know how to press all of the right buttons for those of us 'who were there at the time'
It would appear that alongside not learning reading, writing and arithmetic, not learning how to use Google et al has become 'the next big thing' for the yoof of today. It will be interesting to see how LLM systems cope with people that can neither read, write nor speak in sentences.
The upside of this is, of course, that our talents (being able and willing to think) and knowledge (actually knowing stuff without needing an internet connection) will be eminently marketable commodities well into our dotages should we so wish, which is no bad thing considering the parlous state of our pension plans.
"Other tasks they find overwhelmingly challenging"
Hey, don't get me started on having to set up a Ring doorbell system (again).
It all began when I disabled UPnP on my router, because (I think) it kept telling the ports I'd forwarded to close down for some reason around the same time every day, and so my streaming birdbox camera stopped... well, streaming. That prompted the Ring system to go offline.
I was dreading it, because of how much of a faff it had been the first time. God, how I hate Wi-Fi devices. And I wasn't disappointed, because it was an even bigger faff this time, letting you get about 9/10ths of the way through the ten-minute long process (for each of the doorbell, and two chimes), before throwing up one of those chintzy 'Ooops' messages favoured by the modern generation that don't actually tell you what went wrong, just that something did. About eight times, in total, across three days because I couldn't be arsed and didn't want to be tempted to smash the thing with a hammer.
Simply hitting 'reconnect' is as useless as the 'Ooops' message, as it fails every time anyway, which is why I went for a complete reinstall.
FINALLY, the doorbell connected with no problems, the first chime after only four failed attempts, and the last one first time.
I used to see the current Viscount Gage quite often when I was a teenager in the 1970's . At that time he was the Honourable Nicky Gage and was a slightly disheveled character, very posh but rather poor. He had a long time to wait before inheriting his title. His ancestor William, 2nd Viscount Gage bought the greengage to Britain.
My mum (mid-80s), my children (nearly 7), and my wife (somewhere between the two😁) are all terrified to do anything with devices for the same reason - ot might not do what's expected. Mum and wife (to a lesser extent) I can understand - they grew up with switches that did just one thing. There was a certainty to what would happen (light-switch in one position - off; opposite position - on). Now, with switches that do something different depending on how long you press them - some periods being very small (Kobo, I'm looking at you...), have no tactile feedback, do completely different things if another button is (or isn't) pressed, need constant monitoring of a screen to know what's happening, etc, they are afraid to break something if they venture outside the half-a-dozen basic things they always do.
(Maybe I don't help as much as I should - I've thought once or twice that "<Sigh> what have you done this time?" isn't the best way to build confidence!)
Youths seem to have lost curiosity about how things work. My eldest - still teen - daughter works part-time as 1st-line IT support for a big company that gave her specific training and is quite proficient in helping users doing their jobs, knows how to handle VPN errors, ActiveDirectory configurations and whatnot.
But outside work she couldn't even use our home networked printer without my help... it just needs connecting without additional authentication!
"I had, myself, been born in the official final year of the Baby Boom" ah me too... My dad was an English major, and French minor at University. I may not know all of the names for all the tenses and corresponding rules, but I sure as hell know when someone "got" a "klinker" in their sentence🙄
My boy is going on 13, (don't get out your calculators, I was 46 when he was born) and was the one to show me how to make a new folder in iOS... Perhaps he'll not contract the Why Syndrome?? And I doubt he's heard a song that was released after 1990...
Recently, I was helping a young ("less than 25-year-old") colleague by means of a remote Teams session and I realised (heard) she was typing capitals using the Caps Lock as a toggle, i.e. <Caps>A<caps><Caps>L<caps><Caps>P<caps>ha to get ALPha.
I was shocked/surprised/bemused in equal measure. So I asked how she entered ! $ % and she explained that she used the 'big key' on the right of the keyboard, i.e. the right shift key. A quick explanation later and she was blaming the keyboard for not having Aa Bb written on the keys to help her! But ultimately happy to have learnt this 'new hack' from me....
On reflection, it is not surprising if you've grown up typing on an 2" wide iPhone keyboard. The idea of pressing two keys together even with the dexterity of small fingers (let alone touch-typing!) means tapping 'lock-letter-lock' is much easier and more reliable and something I should use....
I grew up in Scotland and being called ‘a tube’ was an insult (I think it had something to do with a man’s dangly bits), we’d shout, ‘Oi, you tube!’
When my boss asks me to watch some patronising micro learning training video, which I know I won’t learn anything from, I still go “you tube!” …but he thinks it’s a question and replies, ‘no it’s on our LMS’ - the tube!
Oh hell. By the time I’ve explained that in my day I’d buy hardware and physically assemble it into a working system with nothing more than a Philips screwdriver and a few hours of time required to setup the operating system it’s clear that the dumbification (yes, I’m making up a new word aged 52) of IT has a lot to answer for.
‘Friendly’ error messages on the screen, user interface decisions that change physical layouts into similar but dissimilar layouts of physical keyboards, or Sky Q and Powerline devices that take my 30+ years of experience and make me feel like that ‘It’ll just work’ statement I made just before I started setting things up wasn’t the smartest thing I’d said that day.
To generations of users who just buy a new phone when they run out of room for their 100’s of apps, or can’t devote time to cleaning up their 9,000 photos, or understand the difference between free 5GB storage in Apple iCloud and your local phone storage which has 25GB free space but cannot send more photos to iClouds because it’s full. These are the people who haven’t had to make do and mend, or deal with hours of troubleshooting, so their attention is drawn elsewhere and their knowledge is more Love Island than WiFi standards, or unclear understanding why an iPad stops syncing with a Fitbit even when they are within feet of each other.
You say "Subsequent updates on the Xerox Alto concept over the remainder of that decade added a mouse as a pointing device ..." but https://history-computer.com/xerox-alto-guide/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto agree with my recollection that it had one from the start. I'm interested if you're sure? PS The Ethernet might well have been an add-on.
Got to agree about Printers being the worst, they always have been. Great honking dot matrix ones that you had to feed paper (or payslips, carbon paper) etc
Inkjets that continuously block.
Modern ones that do absolutely everything, except you need to login to the damn things with your very long user name and password to "pull" the document from some cloud, even though you only sit a few feet away from.
The only ones I liked were the mid-era LaserJets (4, 5) that just got on with doing the job, relatively quickly and quietly.