Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
Yea, and I tend to balk and the younger generation that takes everything for granted and knows nothing about how anything works. They just accept everything on the outside with understanding. I cut my teeth on a Bendix G-15 and move to IBM 360's from there.
Dale
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61 here, and I agree wholeheartedly. Many (not all) of the younger generation think they are so tech savvy because they can operate devices. Back when I started in the punched cards era, the operator job was entry-level.
I don't think that they appreciate the in-depth understanding of computers that many of their elders have because those elders wrote in assembly language (and debugged binary dumps), and then in low-level compiled languages, where we had to optimize compilers ourselves to get that precious speedup, or wrote our own compilers to port those languages to different computers, and were even able to alter code on the fly by using the front panel switches to insert instructions (in binary). Nor is it easy to understand that we used to have to work hard to get it right the first time because computer time was so precious. Today it's just compile-run-edit-compile-run-edit, which is more likely to result in sloppy, unreadable code (though we had our share of sloppy coders).
Our failings are many. Impatience, because we've seen and done it before. While a five-year old can learn all the settings on his digital watch, and remember them because it's his first watch, the old-timer has had hundreds of such gadgets, all with different ways to set the time, and gets impatient with yet another device that uses the buttons differently. It's truly boring to old-timers to try to figure out yet another "the niece of my brother-in-law married my cousin's wife" puzzle, so we don't play, and get dumber for it.
And short-term memory also fails rapidly. I used to have a stack of about 12, now I'm lucky if it's three. Never got beat in the card game Concentration when I was a kid. Then by about the time I turned 40, any kid could beat me (Me at 10: right brained, just knew where every card was. Me at 40: left-brained matrix memory [jack of spades 3 down, 2 to the right, 7 of diamonds first row, 2nd down, ...]).
We also were taught more timeless subjects in school. So we tend to value those things more than knowledge that expires in a few years. I was amazed when I interviewed a guy with a Ph.D in LSI (Large Scale Integration) because we had already passed VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) and were at VVLSI (Very Very...). Why would he devote his brain and energy to such temporal pursuits? Why not math? (Maybe that's why Mathematicians and Statisticians were ranked 1 and 2 in job satisfaction in a recent survey.)
And we often talk like old grumps. Like this post.