Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Believe it or not, but even being around since 1975 or so, the (personal) computer is still as big a mystery as it ever was, to the normal people.
|
I grew up in the era of the personal computer (1980s.) I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 and then moved on to the very first IBM PS/2 that came with 2 (!) 3.5" floppy drives. I read computer manuals for fun. When I got a new game or program, I would read the entire manual at least once before inserting the disk into the computer.
In the 1990s, I worked in computer support. Some of my peers were people who hadn't started using a computer until Windows 3.1. They knew how to work with a graphical interface, but they had no clue what was going on behind the scenes. Editing configuration files was foreign to them. Copying files from a command line was impossible. It was difficult to understand how people could have learned how to use computers so well and had no idea how to do anything that didn't have pretty buttons on the screen to click.
It took me a couple years to adjust to the mentality of "just Google it." I still find myself using a physical phone book on occasion. I am a dinosaur, and I am not even old enough to receive AARP promotional material.
The publishers aren't slow in the sense that they don't understand how to adopt the new technology. They are slow in that they don't want to give away their futures without understanding what they are doing. In other words, they are conservatives - they wish to maintain things as they are.