Subj : Re: SSH on BBSes
To   : Nightfox
From : boraxman
Date : Sun Apr 17 2022 13:09:04

 Ni> In a way, it seems a bit bizarre to me that still a lot of people don't
 Ni> have or don't know how to use computers these days.  It seemed like
 Ni> computers were booming, especially in the late 90s to 2000s, and it
 Ni> seemed like more and more people were learning how to use computers (as
 Ni> people had to do) to do their work.  Word processing software and
 Ni> printers had replaced hand-written documents (I used my computer a lot
 Ni> in high school and college to write reports), financial tracking can be
 Ni> easily done on a computer, email and instant messengers made it easy to
 Ni> contact people, etc..  I figured computer skills would be fairly common
 Ni> now, but I guess not.
 Ni> 

In the mid 90's, I was in high school.  I got an XT computer when I was 15, and figured out how to use DOS and load programs, without any manuals (the computer was bought at a garage sale), just from knowing a couple of commands a friend told me.  Other friends bought PC's, and they knew how to navigate DOS, use PKZIP, format disks, etc.  Even my brother, who was even younger than me, when he was about 12 or 13 could navigate our DOS based 386, and even use an archiver.  My uncle also knew how to use DOS, archiving, copying disks.  That being said, computers such as his Amstrad, came with a manual. Most people I knew who had a PC, almost all, could use DOS.

People should still learn basic concepts, such as what files are, directories, how to interpret file sizes, where files go, copying and moving, how to create and extract archives.  Also some basic programming, perhaps python but I'm not sure.  BASIC was ubiquitous when I was young, so if you learned that, you could get your computer to do whatever computation you wanted.  I'm not sure what the modern equivalent is, and perhaps the fact there isn't one is a problem.

And this is where things went wrong, we went from computers which by default when you started them, you could program and instruct, to ones which are now platforms, only a host for someone elses program.

.... Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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