Is Dragon 32 a Mac or Windows computer?
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?
I take it someone has already pointed out that excluded was the word wanted?
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.
Should’ve written “Mac PCs” just to mess with people.
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.
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.
If you’ve had to mess around with EMM386 and HIMEM settings to play Wing Commander 2, you win.
Autoexec.bat’s and boot disks for everything ftw.
I learnt how to use a custom autoexec.bat that had a menu to select the different memory configs. That was a godsend!
People are probably running FreeDOS nowadays though which uses a different syntax.
Yup eventually did this with DOS 6. Suffered from DOS 1 until then.
That knowledge is completely useless now.
Does messing around to play Red Alert at 640 x 480 (instead of the default 320 x 240) qualify? I emphasize that I modded the thing to have ICBM carrying submarines for more realism, and played global thermonuclear war with my university course mate over an RS-232 cable. :P
(We could not afford Ethernet, or maybe couldn’t understand it, since it was such a new thing. I recall seeing shiny Ethernet cards from 3COM with some envy.)
Speaking of nuclear war, did you play this game:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_(video_game)
It was hilarious! Gandhi was launching nukes before Civ 1!
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.
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
Is the hypothesis that Windows being constantly broken forces you to learn how to fix it ? Because that’s kinda what happened to me 😆
I’d add that PCs also had great gaming, which also encourages upgrading, and PCs have always offered more options for upgrading. You learn a lot and can break a lot doing that, both of which add to the experience.
I mean, I managed to fuck up my Windows 95 just by installing a couple of games. God knows how that happened.
I remember!
My family just got a new computer; running the brand new Win95. It was so fancy, I can’t remember what game it was, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, so I tried reinstalling the sound drivers…
I managed to completely nuke our 2 day old PC. Had to get a friend of my stepdad to come and fix it…basically reinstall Windows. I have no idea what I did, but I did learn from that point, you can basically fix anything not hardware related given a bit of time and knowledge.
And that was my origin story, been using Linux full time since 2007, and dabbled for a few years before that.
Same, but I did not mess with the drivers. Learnt quickly how to format and reinstall after the first visit from the “computer guy”.
Same. Got tricked into deleting System32 at age…7 maybe? Started learning a lot from that point 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.
I feel old. Linux didn’t exist when I was 10 years old, Linus was still in high school at that point. My home computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2.
I feel medium aged. Netbooks didn’t exist when I was 10 years old. My home computer was a 386 with Win3.11 that was very dated at the time.
TRS!
Yeah, I’m only turning 24 this October, so that’s much before my time. I’ve always found something charming about machines from that era. My grandfather has an Amiga 500 that he got back in the day that still works. Sometimes him and I play around on it just for fun.
I got an Amiga 500 when I was 7…some years ago now.
I just want to point out that I was somewhat tech literate in the 2000s. and The Mac OS still scared me.
I learned because I was torrenting and broke the family windows computer. It was either fix it or get grounded.
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.
It was VIsta for me!
Mixed messages here: “I’ve simply followed instructions and referred to the help communities, whenever I’ve had trouble.” Fellow human, those are the actions of a programming genius and hacker. The bar is remarkably low. A lot of people can’t even read what it says on the screen.
Peoples’ definition on programming is unclear.
I watched two people argue if Dennis Ritchie or Mark Zuckerberg is better at programming in comments on a youtube video about C.
And they are relatively tech-savy if they watch those videos.
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.
it occurs to me that we’re not a representative section of the online community
This! I have been preaching this for years, both online and IRL with the IT techs I manage. Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
The vast majority of people just want to buy a computer in a box, and have it work mostly perfectly. Which windows and Mac’s do really really well. And yes, windows isnt perfect but neither is Linux. And for 95% of people the most demanding and complicated thing they’ll do is web browsing, and power users might do something wild like play games through steam or install an alternate browser.
And we havent even touched work computers yet, which is a whole other level of “I don’t care at all” from end users.
Remember people “Linux is amazing!” is meaningless to people who have never heard the acronym SSD let alone what it is or why it’s better than a HDD.
I like to compare it to sewing because I genuinely don’t care at all about it. But I hear people say “just thrift clothes and tailor them to you!” But that ignores two things.
- I genuinely can’t think of a whole lot of other leisure activities I’d want to do less than sewing and tailoring.
- I barely know how to sew a button or mend a rip. Do you think I know how to actually tailor something? Or what types of tools I need? Or how to use them?
Tech nerds (myself included) forget just how little the normal person even cares about computers, let alone how they work.
God I love this comic. I’ve used it hundreds of times since he’s posted it.
I also bet the % is very high.
I wouldn’t even consider myself especially techy compared to Lemmy, but I’ve done all of those things.
+1 though I feel like I’m more average when it comes techiness (if anyone feels very techy and qualified to host a survey, I’d be interested in average tech experiences here.)
I would bet the number is extremely high. I’ve done all these things.
Hah, the joke’s one you: some of us are too cheap for using a Raspberry Pi and instead use chinese Pi clones!
Who doesn’t? Is it even possible to get the proper ones shipped most times?
Beaglebone checking in! Although I have splurged for a hardware packet sniffer.
Considering linux, self hosting and open source gets mentioned in every community here… I’d say it’s a significant amount
Well, Lemmy is kind of selfhosted itself, sooo…
A big reason I use Lemmy is because I like all the FOSS discussion lmao.
Yeah I totally don’t mind either, feels like I can say whatever I feel like here and people will understand what I’m saying
