• @[email protected]
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    102 years ago

    I’m on the flip side. I know what a zip is and I can’t stand you using closed source suck-your-soul.

  • Echo Dot
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    452 years ago

    That’s because all they know how to use are iPads. They don’t actually understand how real computers work.

    Plus of course there is this attitude that if it doesn’t immediately work on its own you should give up and just pray to the nebulous entity that is “IT people”.

    You wouldn’t believe how many people get annoyed that I don’t know what their password for something is.

    • @[email protected]
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      For me it’s recovering my boss’s files from his broken mac.

      I have decades of experience in Linux. I can invoke the recovery shell and rsync his files onto a USB stick. But save that locked down OS? No idea. I’d have to watch a video and hope I don’t make a mistake.

      • Echo Dot
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        62 years ago

        The thing with Mac is, it’s easy if you set it up correctly and if you haven’t set it up correctly (as in you have left it in default mode), it’s borderline impossible.

  • @[email protected]
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    1442 years ago

    I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.

    If this zoomer wanted to open it they’d obviously double click.

    So calm down boomers, this is fiction.

    • SpaceCadet
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      42 years ago

      Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesn’t understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesn’t work.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.

        • SpaceCadet
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          Double clicking works for 99% of file types

          You’re completely missing the point.

          Not sure what your point is here

          The point is that when the double click magic doesn’t work for one reason or another, for example because the administrator disabled this feature with a group policy or because the file associations got messed up, the tech illiterate person does not know what to do because they don’t grasp the underlying concept.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 years ago

      They may have emailed it to the zoomer, and the zoomer attempted to open it on their iphone or something that doesn’t have native zip compatibility.

    • @[email protected]
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      112 years ago

      Maybe they downloaded the zip and then immediately tried to open it in a specific program through the open dialog giving them an error. I see similar mistakes with my parents - they have no concept of where files are, it’s just “on the computer” because they rely so heavily on “smart” file picker dialogs that show you everything recent or by a file type no matter where it’s actually located.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 years ago

      Not super tech literare… Is there even a reason to unzip the files if you just want to grab one of them? I kust assumed windows is unzipping it into some weird temporary memory anyway to show me them, so a file is a file?

      • @[email protected]
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        112 years ago

        I mean the file is zipped, as in compressed. So it might just look like a file, but if you open it inside the zip (with file explorer) Windows does have to decompress the file in the background to show it to you.

        Which is obviously slightly slower than if you unzip the file and put it somewhere and then open it, but you won’t really notice the difference except we’re talking about massive files.

        And of course if you make changes to the file you can’t save it (except to a new file) as it gets opened up as read only.

        If you just want to store the file and view it every now and then I don’t see a reason to unzip it. And you can always do that later anyway.

    • @[email protected]
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      552 years ago

      If it’s an executeable with dependencies in the archive it might not run without being unpacked.

        • @[email protected]
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          10 months ago

          You can’t email exes, but once you zip it there is no exe, it’s a zip. If outlook automatically unpacks and scans the zip (which i doubt) you can always password lock the archive

          Edit: And my email them i mean attach them in outlook

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        The greentext says “he asks for some files”, that doesn’t sound like an executable, which usually gets blocked by the mail system anyway (even in a zip, if there’s no password on it).

        But yeah, that is one way to have it broken, besides Windows refusing to run a random .exe

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      I call bullshit on this post. Since Windows 10 you can just double click a zip file and it opens up like any other directory (even if it isn’t) and shows you the files.

      Just the other day I had to tell someone to unzip first before they could patch the rom (they were going to play some romhack on an emulator); I don’t know how old they were but clearly there can be scenarios where someone has a zip file and don’t know what to do with it or use it.

      I don’t even know what the rom was or which emulator they were using, because I just told them if they google Rom Patcher JS that’s going to work for whatever file type it is, because according to them the problem was that the patcher they had didn’t work…

      But as it turns out they were trying to use the .zip archive as the patch file, so I then had to explain to them that they need to extract it first.

      And afterwards the patcher they had did work so I don’t think they even used Rom Patcher JS in the end.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        That’s also more of a Windows issue than a user issue. I absolutely hate that file types are hidden by default in file explorer, makes the whole thing feel unusable. First option I change whenever I touch a Windows PC.

        So besides the icon you can’t see at first glance as a casual user that it’s a zip file. And a ROM most likely had an icon the user wasn’t used to, so they didn’t notice something was wrong :-/

        • @[email protected]
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          Right, I forget about that every time until I’m reminded of it. It’s the first thing I change along with showing hidden files when helping someone. (Even if what they need help with is unrelated)

  • @[email protected]
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    02 years ago

    They don’t know how to program in assembly because they don’t have to know. Same is true for WinRAR, rotary phones, stick shifts, and all the other cruft that prior generations had to deal with.

    Hardship makes you hardy but reducing hardship is progress.

    • Liz
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      42 years ago

      The industrious among us just find other frontiers to push and hardships to subject ourselves to.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      Zips aren’t “cruft”. Many new formats are zips with another name, like all the office OOXML formats (docx,xlsx,…), 3mf and so on.

  • DumbAceDragon
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    2 years ago

    I have yet to meet the braindead skibidy rizz zip file zoomers everyone keeps talking about. I assume I’ll find them with the latte avocado toast millennials.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      I know a few. Some of the younger people we’ve hired recently as more computer illiterate than my 93 year old grandfather.

    • @[email protected]
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      212 years ago

      You’d be surprised.

      The thing is they tend to be in the same avenues as where you’d encounter tech illiterate people of every other generation too.

      While there is a degree to which there’s age barriers, it was more a thing going from no computers at all to computers.

      Nowadays age means less in terms of tech competency than things like socioeconomic background, professional background, and general interest.

      Sports kids in HS who grow up to go into a nepotistic position at a construction business doing sales have roughly the same tech competency if they were born in 1970 or 2000.

    • @[email protected]
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      112 years ago

      I work in tech and all of the recent hires (Gen Z) are domain-general smart: they have great critical thinking skills, can reason through a problem abstractly, and pick things up fast.

      But damn can some of them not use a computer in an efficient manner. Having to walk them through changing display settings or how to set up Outlook rules or basic keyboard shortcuts is a little painful.

      As someone who, nowadays, uses his phone for pretty much 98% of all computing tasks, I get it. But it’s still painful

    • @[email protected]
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      I’ve met them. But I’ve also met tech illiterate millennials. And genius boomers.

      I don’t have enough data to conclude yet, so options are open. I do believe zoomers use computers less than millennials do tho, in favor of smartphones.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        I worked as tech support for a patient portal at a previous job and found that a lot of both boomers and zoomers use their smartphones exclusively. The bulk of our calls were from boomers and trying to teach them to navigate a smartphone over the phone was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to do.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 years ago

          Explaining them how to navigate a computer over phone is even worse.

          Had to explain for 15 minutes to some old guy where the location of the start button was.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        As far as I can tell boomers know how a computer works and don’t know how to do this weird thing they need to do for some reason or they break it in a weird way. Zoomers seem to be a mixed bag of no IT knowledge or never needing help. Everyone else just drops the laptop and lies about it.

  • @[email protected]
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    1422 years ago

    This has actually been studied. Turns out, zoomers are so reliant on smart technology like tablets and phones, they never actually learned anything about normal PC file systems or extensions. They literally don’t understand what a folder is because they’ve never been exposed to PC or Mac environments.

  • @[email protected]
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    There are tech illiterate people in every generation, but they definitely seemed more prevalent in the boomer generation. In my experience it’s Boomers > Gen X > Zoomers > Millenials in terms of most to least technologically incompetent. Always suspected millennials are usually more comfortable with tech because they grew up with it, and it grew up with them.

    For older generations, especially boomers, I figure they were more set in their ways and for many (but not all, obviously) it was hard to adapt. For Zoomers, I think it was just assumed that they’d just be inherently good so there were many things they were never actually taught (though many of them learned for themselves because they are nerds, which is pretty great if you ask me). Anyways, that’s my theory on generational tech literacy.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      I’m Gen X and credit playing video games for most of my self-taught knowledge on how computers work. My first computer was an Apple IIe, which didn’t require much more than putting disks in and typing startup commands, but when we got a Windows 3.1 PC next, I had to learn about file systems and troubleshooting when things inevitably went wrong. To this day, most of the computer stuff I’ve learned was from trying to get games working.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        Yeah, PC gaming was a pretty significant motivator for me to learn all sorts of tech related skills.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 years ago

          And the limited experience I have with Linux is from getting my Raspberry Pi working. I even posted about having a problem and learned about “sudo.” (it worked)

    • @[email protected]
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      132 years ago

      I don’t know, I had my dad on the phone the other day. He was explaining his backup routine and rotation between two different location. He is 65, worked most of his life with unreliable OS. Sensitive hard drives, floppies etc. He know how to make sure his data is safe.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        There are absolutely boomers who are well versed in tech, shit some of them helped invent it, but there’s definitely a trend of boomers in general being tech illiterate.

    • @[email protected]
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      202 years ago

      In my social circle, none of the 15-25 hav the slightest idea how to work a computer (no, wait, there’s one out of the six or seven). So they all come to the nearly 60 year old me that has to explain to them again what a directory is.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 years ago

        Yeah, not being able to touch-type on a keyboard seems to be a skill many don’t develop/aren’t taught too. Basic stuff just gets skipped over because it’s just assumed young people are good with tech (probably a holdover from raising millennials)

        • @[email protected]
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          42 years ago

          The typing thing is interesting. I’m old enough that I learned to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter in the early 1990s (we had Apple IIs in the “computer lab” - but there were two rooms full of typewriters for this class). I did well in general in high school, but I took typing much more seriously than many other classes, because I hadn’t yet learned it on my own, and I knew how useful it would be in life. My classmates thought I was nuts (again, I’m sure). But that was one high school class that definitely did help me in “the real world”.

          So now, despite the ubiquity of computers, it seems they aren’t teaching typing.

    • @[email protected]
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      132 years ago

      GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media. Then it’s more of a Luddite thing, because in 2007-8, I worked with early Facebook APIs (graph bullshit) and developed a deep hatred for Zuckerberg and his shitty website.

      I think the nerdy Gen X are a lot more technical than the nerdy Zoomers because we had to know more to use early PCs as kids. But it also meant a lot of us didn’t get into it until a bit later in life (or to make a Buck before the various don’ dot-com bubbles burst).

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        GenXer here. I’m not tech illiterate, except when it comes to social media.

        Same. It’s funny that the things that come naturally to Zoomers are intimidating to me and vice-versa. Of course, a big part of that is that I didn’t grow up with social media and therefore have no interest in it (except for message board style things like Lemmy.)

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        I’m gen z and I’ve noticed the same thing. Nearly all gen z use computers, but because its so accessible and simplified they are nearly all tech illiterate.

        The people most knowledgeable about tech that I’ve met have been gen x. A lot of them are unfortunately some of the least knowledgeable though because they had no experience with computers until later in life.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Gen X built the Internet you’re using actually, and most of the server infrastructure that runs the world.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            A select few, sure. But as far as I’ve noticed, Gen X (especially the older half) are like Boomer-Lite, and not just from a technological-literacy standpoint, either.

    • @[email protected]
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      562 years ago

      I’m a xennial, and i think one of the key characteristics of my generation is that we grew up with tech becoming omnipresent, but it was also non user friendly tech.

      We started having PCs young, but we really had to know how to build our systems, it was much less plug and play. We grew up with visual OSs, but configuring that shit was not intuitive at all. Or outright broken (looking at you Win ME). We had to troubleshoot, fix, learn, read and test just to get our tech working.

      Younger generations grew up with tech omnipresent yes, but tech that mostly works intuitively - you barely ever have to really figure shit out, fix it or reconfigure it.

      Just my 2 cents!

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        I have two older siblings that are xennials, and I would say people born from about the late 70’s to the early 90’s represent the peak of technological literacy. It’s almost like a bell curve… the further you get away from each end of that range, the more technologically incompetent (on average) people are.

      • HobbitFoot
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        102 years ago

        To add in to it, a lot of the experience during the formative years was with desktop computers. Consoles were there, but had far less capabilities. Handheld devices were generally more expensive compared to today and worse to use.

        So you’ve got a case where young adults today have to work on a computer platform completely foreign to them while young adults 20 years ago usually had 5 - 10 years experience as a user on that platform.

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        A lot of current users aren’t ever exposed to the underlying tech. They only use a few applications. The ideal device for them is a tablet (or a ChromeBook). They know next to nothing about files, networks, most aspects of hardware (except the bling factor, maybe).

        It’s both a good and a bad thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 years ago

        Yeah, once we had invented proper tablets and smartphones, those things are so intuitive that I have seen videos of monkeys figuring out how to use them.

        We got the sweet spot. Having to know how to program the VCR and cable boxes gave us a leg up on troubleshooting, and DOS just sealed the deal. Never thought I would be thankful for all those frustrating days.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          That is about the only animal testing I approve of.

          Can’t wait for companies to put “So easy to use, even a monkey could do it” sticker on their tablets.

        • @[email protected]
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          122 years ago

          Anybody else here remember being the kid that knew how to set up VCRs for their grandparents and parents? LOL

          I learned how the cables worked so that I could get my NES to work on the TV. Sometimes you’d have to wire it through the VCR and so I learned how the VCR worked. Then I was a wizard to the old people

  • @[email protected]
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    332 years ago

    This really bugs me at work sometimes. I’m a designer and I often have to split up images in several mails because others don’t understand the concept of archives. Or even worse: send the photos as “excel image file” (slapping them all in a excel sheet). I even once had a printery tell me my file was corrupt because it was (accidentally on my part) compressed as 7z. Oh how I would love to send files more often as 7zip… But that’s black magic apparently.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 years ago

      I used to work in a camera shop back in the day. Alot of people came in with a thumb drive of some sorts, and wanted pictures printed of images in a word-document. They were baffeled when we said we can’t print it with our lab. “But it is right there on the screen!”

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Well at least windows just treats archives as folders as infæ you can just double click on them. Don’t even have to extract anything to work with the files

      Windows 11 also supports rar and 7zip natively

  • @[email protected]
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    802 years ago

    Weird, right? I feel like I grew up in the perfect generation, where I started with MS-DOS and Windows ‘95. We had to KNOW how things worked in order to get games and other software running. Had to know how to install, how to fix driver issues, how to configure things, etc. Even (re)install a complete OS.

    But tech these days ‘just works’. A lot of software is one click installs, with no real user interaction needed. And everything else is easily accessed on the web or a phone app. Windows itself is also much more reliable, so even that doesn’t require much knowledge.

    It’s made everything available to a much wider audience, but it also means people don’t need to develop actual skills in this area. A good example is my dad. He never figured out how to do things on our Windows ‘95 PC, but he loves his iPad because it’s so easy toddlers can use it.

        • @[email protected]
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          162 years ago

          Sure, but current distros mostly “just work”. My desktop linux installation is broken half the time because I enjoy tinkering, but the one on my work laptop (linux mint debian edition) has been working like a charm since day 1.

      • @[email protected]
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        82 years ago

        I feel lots of people don’t realize how Linux is much easier to use nowadays. Most people I talk to seem to assume they need to learn how to use the terminal, but really they just can do everything by using the GUI.

        I agree with you. I currently dual boot, but once windows 10 is not updated anymore, I’ll just use Mint and go Microsoft free. It’s less bloated, no telemetry, most games work flawlessly to perfectly (with proton it will just get better) and most applications needed are easily found in the software manager and are for the most part open source.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          Also most problems have already been asked on forums, reddit or Lemmy so it’s not that hard to fix problems.

        • @[email protected]
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          132 years ago

          “First boot is so much quicker than Windows!”

          “Wanna talk about the setup that comes after that to get everything working as it should?”

          “Oh no, we don’t talk about that.”

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          most “just works” distros have really intuitive installers though, I’d even say it’s easier than windows, if not for the mandated Microsoft bullshit on all computers by default like secure boot and TPM

        • Twig
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          2 years ago

          It’s not 2007 any more.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              You could but it takes the fun out of Arch. Okay maybe if your at your tent installation of arch or you already known how Linux works yeah it makes sense but if you want to learn it’s not the most optimal

        • @[email protected]
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          132 years ago

          Doing my first linux install on a main PC (after a decade of managing a headless server). Honestly, getting the trackpad to scroll at the right speed has been something of a hobby of mine lately.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            Meanwhile on Windows, you leave everything on default and deal with it.
            For me, Linux isn’t a time sink cause nothing works right out of the box, but because everything can be optimized.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              Linux Mint is really just the easiest for people who want to leave everything on default. If you ever want to get into Linux, I would recommend checking out Mint. Literally anything is better than WIndows.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Nothing quite like having to learn to edit config.sys in order to make something work with no internet or references at all.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Camping out at the library with whatever computer magazines they had in the reference section taking notes or using your last dime to make a copy because god forbid your parents would waste money on a subscription to BYTE or something.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      Nothing quite like having to learn to edit config.sys in order to make something work with no internet or references at all.

    • @[email protected]
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      You had to prove you were worthy to play the game by resolving IRQ conflicts and figuring out how to squeeze every spare byte out of HIMEM.SYS. Sometime it was more challenging than the actual game.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        And let’s not forget that ‘system requirements’ were more like ‘system suggestions and challenges’. Especially when your parents bought ‘a computer’ with hardware specs that basically read ‘hard drive, memory, soundcard, CD-ROM drive’.

        So when configuring things, there was some trial and error involved in figuring out what the software could attempt to configure in order to work with your specific thing. It’s not like today where us gamers pick the exact hardware down to the RGB-infused RAM.

        And few things were plug and play prior to USB. You know how shitty printers are now? Try wrestling with one of those on a fucking parallel port.

  • IWantToFuckSpez
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    That’s partially fault of IT isn’t it. They didn’t set the computer up with an unzipper.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆
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      2 years ago

      Unless they are on a super old ass version of Windows: Zip and Unzip functionality is built directly into the OS. They would open like any other folder.

      Microsoft also just announced not too long ago that native .rar file support is being added.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Depends on what was in the .zip. The default double click action for .zip files is usually to display the contents, not to unzip it, and if you try to run an executable from that display it usually won’t work.

      They may have also tried to load the .zip directly into another program.

  • m3t00🌎
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    82 years ago

    wut is (z, b)oomer. all users are usually dumb. if you are average half are dumber than you

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
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    72 years ago

    It’s a work PC. And for the users work PCs operate entirely different from all other similar OS machines they know from private life.

  • Tar_Alcaran
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    472 years ago

    Behold the difference between the generation growing with Win98, where everything was manual and accessible and doing it wrong could mean a manual install, and the generation growing up with iPhones, where you’re not allowed to change anything whatsoever.

      • jelloeater
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        22 years ago

        I’ve been teaching my gen Z coworkers about stuff. They are good kids, we should try and learn them a thing or two ❤️ They’re not all lazy brain dead kids. They kind of look up to us elder millennials.