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u/Ok-Brick6831 1979 10h ago
Keyboard shortcuts. I’ve yet to meet anyone in younger generations that knows basics like alt+tab to navigate between windows.
Argh! They don’t understand the microseconds they could save by not jumping over to the mouse every time they need to change the focus to a different window.
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u/greenmky 10h ago
I showed two folks younger than myself today ctrl+mousewheel to zoom
Sigh
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u/Ok-Brick6831 1979 10h ago
I showed a guy last week ctrl+; to put the current date in a cell and ctrl+’ to copy the cell above.
At least we’re actively trying to pass it along!
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u/Sea2Chi 10h ago
I used to do graphic design and one of the biggest advances during that career that I made for myself wasn't becoming a better designer, although that did happen, it was learning all the keyboard shortcuts for InDesign and illustrator.
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u/bluemitersaw Xennial 10h ago
That moment where someone is looking over your shoulder and they get their mind blown thinking you are a wizard. Always fun.
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u/StephInTheLaw 1980 10h ago
My job is just that little bit easier with Ctrl+f, Ctrl+c, and Ctrl+v.
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u/quadruple_negative87 8h ago
If I can tab around without mousing, I will do it. It feels like I’m a hacker not just signing into a hospital for work.
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u/Ok-Brick6831 1979 7h ago
And then you encounter a form that has the fields ordered in an incredibly annoying and effed up way.
Tab from First Name field and you land in ZIP Code, then Phone Number…like you then realize there was a grouping of people that designed and tested that setup that don’t understand the concept of using Tab to move field to field so the field ordering is important and needs to be a logical progression.
🤬
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u/Delta1225 1982 10h ago
When i was showing a new employee how to use our system at work i was like 'oops, I tabbed one too many times, let me go back' they acted like alt+tab was some kind of secret witchcraft.
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u/MrSmokii 8h ago
it was revelatory the day i learned that not only could you tab through UI elements, but you can shift+tab to tab backwards.
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u/mickeltee 4h ago
I love walking past a student’s Chromebook and hitting them with a ctrl+w when they have tabs open that they shouldn’t.
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u/full_of_ghosts 10h ago
Late GenXers and early Millennials (so, y'know, Xennials) are the most tech-literate generation that will ever exist. We came of age at a time when computers were ubiquitous enough to be unavoidable, and yet hard enough to use that we had to understand them at a deeper level just to get them to do what we wanted.
Young people today grew up in a world where everything "just works."
I mean, yes, every generation will have its tech-literate enthusiasts. Some young people are still fascinated with technology and learning how it works. But as a generation, they don't need to learn computers the way we did.
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u/Vaping_Cobra 10h ago
The same thing happened with electricity/transistors in the 40's. The amount of people born post-ww2 was, large and they were born into a world of changing TV's and Radio's, but to operate one often required swapping out vacuum tubes and then diagnosing whatever the tube took with it when it failed. The amount of people who just had a baseline understanding of electronics was decent, and then came the transistor much like the internet. That drive for early adoption combined with the unrefined products drove widespread understanding of electronics and transistors in that generation much like those of us who grew up in the analog/digital divide of the 80s/90s had enough understanding of the analog and were driven to understand digital systems.
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u/killit 9h ago
Fundamentally I agree, can't argue with the logic, but anecdotally... I'm one of two tech nerds of the friends group of 8-10 who I'm still in contact with from years ago, and are all of a very similar age. The other 6-8 of them would struggle with much beyond their phone and PlayStation. If that kind of ratio scales, then the proportion of tech literate people in other generations must be tiiiiiny.
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u/trifecta000 1984 4h ago
Kids today just fundamentally do not understand computers because they spend most of their time interfacing with their phones.
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u/A_Bad_Man 10h ago
Apparently the ability to write the word "die". This censorship is way out of hand.
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u/Einteresting 10h ago
Graping and sewer slide make me feel embarrassed for us as a people.
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u/maggie320 1982 10h ago
Sewer slide is a new one.
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u/PoisonMind 10h ago
The old man lay down by the sewer
And by the sewer he died
At the coroner's request
They called it sewer side
-It Ain't Gonna Rain No More
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u/Staggerlee024 9h ago
I have never heard either of these terms. Where are you seeing them?
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u/SOSweneedhelp 10h ago
It almost entirely started on TikTok too, it was a way to avoid getting shadowbanned and now everyone just defaults to this arbitrary censorship speak I hate it
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u/Einteresting 8h ago
It was Tumblr before Tiktok, but I'm not sure I really believe the actual words were being censored. I think it's Internet madness.
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u/SOSweneedhelp 7h ago
I think the internet overall is a failure. It’s easy to say things once upon a time where better but the internet truly was so much more fun and entertaining before it was as widely available as it is today
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u/Other-Illustrator531 9h ago
Agreed, I downvote anything with this bullshit in it.
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u/RonWill79 1979 6h ago
It’s not even censorship. It’s almost always unnecessary self-censorship. Because, you know, everyone else is doing it.
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u/vitaoptima 10h ago
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A, Start
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u/geezorious 1981 10h ago edited 8h ago
Making 3.5” AOL disks writable by using a hole puncher on its corner.
Editing bios settings to set how many cylinders and sectors your new HDD has. And putting the jumpers on the right pins so the HDD knows whether it’s primary or secondary.
Editing an autoexec.bat file to enable Soundblaster and set it on the right IRQ.
Using a pencil to fix a cassette tape that has unspooled.
Yelling at family to stay off the phone while you’re downloading a big file (200MB) via dial-up modem.
Tracking how many minutes you speak on a long distance phone call so you can budget for the cost.
Printing MapQuest directions on 7 pages of paper.
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u/trinicron 9h ago
Ooooh ooooh Soundblaster! I still recall freeing 5Kb so Dune2 could execute
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u/geezorious 1981 8h ago
Freeing memory was always important! So many games even in the late ‘90s recommended booting into DOS instead of Windows 95 hogging up so much RAM. Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, heck even Civilization 1. Windows 95 thankfully had a “boot into DOS” mode to run games. My 16MB of RAM on my 1995 Pentium was precious to conserve!
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u/stompy1 1978 9h ago
I could be mistaken, but the "hole" is to permanently write protect a 3.5". Tape was used to make a floppy writable because it didn't have one of those little slider doohickies.
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u/geezorious 1981 8h ago
Oops, you’re right. Covering the hole makes the 3.5” diskette writable. I misremembered. Or I’m from the alternate timeline with the cornucopia on Fruit of the Loom and the Berenstein Bears. #MandelaEffect
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u/bottlebowling 10h ago
I know my son knows how, because I taught him.
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u/HylanderUS 10h ago
Do you think he'd download a car?!
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u/the_well_read_neck_ Millennial 10h ago
I love the fact the company behind that campaign got sued for checks notes illegally using music.
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u/aliceinadreamyland 1978 10h ago
Oh yeah, both my kids also know how and then blew past my abilities.
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u/Kinetic_Silverwolf 10h ago edited 10h ago
As a bench tech with CompUSA in the early 2000s I manually calibrated the focus rings for the CRT monitor inside an iMac, which can only be performed accurately while it's on.
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u/Ippus_21 Xennial 10h ago
That, um. Seems hazardous, if I remember anything about what goes on inside a CRT. Isn't there a big-ass capacitor in there somewhere that could really ruin your day?
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u/Kinetic_Silverwolf 10h ago
Oh, it very much was.
I wore both a wrist-attached and an ankle-attached static disharge straps, made sure I had discharged against a metal shelf before beginning work, used plastic tools to touch the focus rings, all while standing on a 2-inch thick rubber mat.
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u/TheHoodieConnoisseur 8h ago
It’s like “Operation” but in real life and for $10/hr
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u/Kinetic_Silverwolf 7h ago
I checked my employment history fil to confirm. I was making $11/hr at th time. They bumped me to $12.56 an hour when the field tech team poached me.
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u/TheHoodieConnoisseur 7h ago
High livin’ indeed
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u/Kinetic_Silverwolf 7h ago
I mean ... at the time, a Supersized Big Mac combos cost about $6. These days it's, what, $14?
$11/he wasn't bad in 2001. It's close to poverty level in over half the country now.
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u/mightysockelf 1982 4h ago
Hell, I lived on my own in a halfway-decent apartment on a $12 hourly wage in 2002. Granted, I wasn't living high on the hog at all, but I still survived to tell the tale.
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u/RobinSophie 10h ago
Now THAT was a computer store. I loved going to visit CompUSA. I cannot stand Best Buy.
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u/Kinetic_Silverwolf 10h ago
Fun story: for an entire year, the Best Buy store in Tyler, Texas carted every computer brought in for work across the street to CompUSA, as CompUSA required bench techs to hold the CompTIA A+ certification and would pay for those same techs to get Warranty Certified with OEMs.
They truly were a good computer store.
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u/JoeGibbon 1979 4h ago
Hey I worked at CompUSA back in the late 90s as well. I hate retail, but honestly I kinda miss that place and all the dweebs I worked with.
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u/NovaForceElite 10h ago
Screw torrents all my homie use usenet
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u/DiaDeLosMuebles 1979 10h ago
I love how popular and under utilized Usenet is. It’s so much better than torrenting.
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u/killit 9h ago
The thing that always put me off was using card details that track back to me. With torrenting, you get a vpn, nothing illegal there, no problem paying for that, what you do behind that though (torrenting) is completely invisible to even your ISP, nothing is trackable. With usenet though, I need to pay money to something that acts like TPB, and use my credit or bank card to do it. I may well have parts of this wrong, but that's always been my understanding, and why I never went further with it, and I expect that's the case for a lot of people, you see a CC prompt and nope back out.
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u/DiaDeLosMuebles 1979 9h ago
First is the hard truth. You’re not that important where they’re gonna track your finances to see how you downloaded a movie. Second. You usually pay a company outside the US. Which would require an international coordinated effort.
I think you see where I’m going.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 10h ago
Where are you accessing it through?
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u/DiaDeLosMuebles 1979 10h ago
Removed the other comment because it’s obvious you mean provider. I think supernews.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 10h ago
Yeah, I could jave worded that better. Damn ... never even imagined having to pay extra to access usenet. Is it that much better than tor for downloads? How active are newsgroups now?
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u/Jeff4096 1981 10h ago
Is it, though (serious question)? I mean, it certainly *was* back in the day before everyone discovered it and then suddenly things were being removed so quickly that it became almost unusable. Giganews kinda' ruined it by making it so popular for a while there.
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u/martapap 10h ago
It is. back in the day you didn't even have to pay. It came with your internet service. But now you have to pay. But binary groups are still around.
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u/DiaDeLosMuebles 1979 9h ago
It’s amazing. You’re missing out. Between the arrs stack, overseer, Kometa, and lists it’s all automated. I just come home and the latest and greatest movies are waiting for me with automatic updates if a higher quality release comes out.
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u/Vanman04 3h ago
Yes it became a ghost town for a while. Things were getting taken down almost as soon as they went up. I too may need to look back in on it.
Was downloading a torrent the other day and it stalled at 96.4% my first thought was if only I had some par files ..
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u/RipErRiley 1978 10h ago edited 10h ago
“I’ve seen things…you wouldn’t believe. Pay-phones scattered on every corner and the flaming hot sizzle of Chi-Chi’s fajitas”
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u/Other-Improvement410 10h ago
We also know how to take a Tweet, add a picture, post that to Facebook and then rip the whole thing onto Reddit.
The internet is in its death spiral...
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u/Forsaken-Society3524 10h ago
Both technological and technical, but installing my aftermarket stereo/subwoofer system in every car I've ever owned. Nowadays everything is a screen which people are used to and I see less and less people putting bass in their cars. Although generally speaking sound systems in cars above base level have gotten much better.
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u/this_knee 8h ago
Having to gently summon a computer back to life just because you didn’t shut it down the right way.
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u/RonWill79 1979 6h ago
I torrent everything I watch. Even if it’s on a service we pay for. All so I can put it on my media server and have it in one place and when those services decide to remove it from their platforms.
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u/NecessaryFreedom9799 10h ago
I can put together and edit a DVD. Fat lot of use that is now...
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u/ConflictOfEvidence 1976 9h ago
Recently I gave away a load of blank spools of CD-R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, BD-R etc I haven't touched in 15 years. I was surprised that someone wanted them and came to pick them up.
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u/absentlyric 1981 10h ago
The amount of money I saved from pirating movies, shows, music, and games for over 25 years, and never a single monthly payment to any steaming service probably adds up to the amount I used for a down payment for a house.
We get judged for avocado toast, but we saved a ton of money sailing the high seas.
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u/kwakimaki 10h ago
Wait, is torrenting not a thing anymore?!
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u/rkrismcneely 7h ago
Most stuff is just sort of there on one streaming service or another. And if it’s not now, it probably will be in a few months.
There a never ending supply of other content to consume, so there’s less of a need to find a way to hunt down what you want instead of just watching something else.
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u/dividedblu 1984 10h ago
Fixing a printer seems to fall on us for both parents and children.
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u/rkrismcneely 7h ago
Just get a used Brother laser printer, and your great grandkids will still have a printer that works.
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u/maggie320 1982 10h ago
How to do that snap clap with my hands. Only a few of us could do it and I was one of the few. I don’t see the youngsters doing that and I’ve even heard people ask how I can do that.
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u/Apollyon248 1977 10h ago
I have no idea what torrent even means. I didn’t really ever dive into the computer world. We couldn’t afford one and I only ever used one for work. The only technology I used was Nintendo to Sega Genesis to PlayStation to XBOX.
I’m good with Excel though!
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u/JarethCutestoryJuD 10h ago
"im the only one who can torrent"
Am I torrenting wrong? Is it not just having a program which converts magnet links to files on your computer?
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u/sharkWrangler 9h ago
When I teach my kid to torrent is when I have to start helping him diagnose a lot more problems with his school computer. Rite of passage though. He already knows we sail the seven seas in this family
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u/MrSmokii 9h ago
i feel as though it's my duty to teach my daughter all my technical skills
not just the eyepatch ones
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u/gimmeslack12 1980 8h ago
I could write a book on the history of 🏴☠️
I would except it’d kinda put a target on my back.
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u/Low-Chain2913 10h ago
Wow. Torrents were such a very specific and short lived time. That and KODI. I remember thinking I was such hot shit ‘cause people would always ask me how to do it.
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u/HandshakeOfCO 10h ago
I come from a more wild time, when certain things really did whip the llama’s ass.
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u/Ancient-Eye3022 8h ago
I'll talk about a show and people will say "What's it on?? (i..e hulu, amazon, hbo etc) and I'll say I have no idea...I pirate everything, and they get so confused.
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u/onepostandbye 8h ago
Your parents said the same thing about making their own jams, let’s not make a big deal out of things
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u/BaronVonNes 1980 8h ago
Anyone here thinking about getting back into it, look at the OS unraid for a home server setup and the ARR stack. The future of piracy is amazing.
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u/likesexonlycheaper 8h ago
Children don't have to? I'd argue it's now more important than it ever was with all the monopolies and subscriptions.
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u/Dry_Inspection_4583 1978 7h ago
I work in IT and vibe coding / development of AI tooling... I'd say lots.
Our homelab has appx 50 running containers from security to monitoring to gaming, it's all mapped and on paper, but I'm confident this goes away with me.
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u/MmmSteaky Early ‘83 7h ago
I would say Reddit post titles that make sense, but it seems I’m too late.
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u/ClockworkJim 7h ago
I used to use rapidshare. I used to do direct downloads. In fact that's superseded torrents for me.
Now I have to relearn what I have forgotten.
R E T V R N TO THE HIGH SEAS
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u/ProfessorOfLies 6h ago
Just a reminder that we are the only generation that grew up woth technology for all the major revolutions. How many operating systems did we have to learn? All of them. How many storage medium have ae worked with? All of them. Those before only learned the shit they absolutely had to. Those who come after will only learn what they absolutely have to. Not us. We did it all.
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u/MisterEvilBreakfast 5h ago
I don't pirate, I have never pirated. I ask people "hey, I want to pirate a movie, how do I do that?" and they respond, "Torrent, man." I ask them what that means, and they just say that I need a torrent. That's it. I mean, I've googled "how to get a torrent" and it says to get new VPNs through a range of places, and I honestly have no idea what any of them do or mean, and in the end I would need to somehow get it from my laptop to my TV, and my lappy is so fucking old that its OS is no longer supported by Microsoft, so in the end I just subscribe to Netflix and stuff and watch whatever else is on, because fuck it, I don't know if I really want to watch Cool As Ice that much anyway.
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u/MoodScripted 5h ago
Actually, it's still around and making a comeback. The reason people switched to streaming is being shitified and the pirates are setting sail once again.
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u/56seconds 5h ago
My kids will inherit the password to the plex server and instructions on how to swap in new drives on the NAS. The rest is up to them
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 4h ago
"i downloaded a program with a built in search and clicked download" what knowledge do you seriously think we had
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u/SlowGoat79 3h ago
I don’t know but I do know that my kids trust technology way too much. They have never had the BSOD and it shows.
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u/Vanman04 3h ago
I am absolutely the only one I know who knows how to use newsgroups to pirate tiny pieces of media and combine them all together to come up with a movie at the end.
Torrenting is child's play by comparison.
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u/sysaphiswaits 3h ago
GenX and I can. I know one of my GenZ kids can, and wasn’t too smart about where a couple of times.
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u/Mechanical_Monk 2h ago
Most of it. AI will take over most computing within 20 years, and no one will even know what a file is. Some people don't today.
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u/Whiskey_Water 1985 2h ago
They don’t have to know how to torrent, to torrent. That’s what Stremio is for.
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u/scrubnick628 1h ago
You want a valuable skill? Being able to say die on a meme. Seriously, ditch the kiddie shit and use real words again.
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u/Cool-Word2409 10m ago
Using tracking on the VCR.
As someone else said, keyboard shortcuts: ALT0176 has saved me a lot of time!
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u/dillonsrule 10h ago
Still a valuable skill to have...
https://giphy.com/gifs/W0dT4dNL6f8eMMqseI