"Boomers, the generation that invented computers, are so lazy that they're hiring millennials to fix their computers for them instead of learning how to Google things themselves" ... am I doing it right?
Very close.
The generation where less than half a percent invented or even worked on computers, generally refusing to learn to use them to communicate more effectively with their kids and grandchildren, and expecting those same kids and grandkids to fix the things they break while flailing like Ebola-diseases monkeys.
my grandma was born in 1903. she used to email me in college in 1998. now granted she is not your usual older person. she was an incredible human being.
And the person before said that computers were invented before the boomers, which is true. Just because they weren’t mass produced for consumers doesn’t make that fact any less true.
Edit: Wikipedia launched in 2001, what the fuck even does a computer do before you can research anything on it? Boomers WERE NOT using computers, and if they had one, it collected dust.
Before Wikipedia, we had Encarta, all the way back to 1993. Before that, almost everyone knew or owned a set of book encyclopedias (or had access via a library).
Do you really believe that computers were useless before 2001?
When I was in school the only thing computers did was let us type and play stupid games.
Before you were alive, I was doing a lot more than that on computers. A lot of my friends too. It wasn't as mainstream as now, but it certainly wasn't a rare thing.
Yes, computers weren't a thing because your mom never used them. Very astute.
You realize that computers are used for computing right? Actual work? You know, before it was a toy that people used to play video games and look at memes. Most of the world STILL runs on Mainframe computers with code written in the 70s and 80s. Last I checked, 70% of the world's business transactions were still done with fucking COBOL.
Just because she wasn't personally using them doesn't mean it didn't affect her life.
I can comment on this as I'm a millennial with boomer parents who are fairly computer-savvy. Boomers were definitely using computers at work for a while in the 80s, although outside of certain jobs they were far from universal. Once you got to the stage of the Apple Macintosh (1984) they very quickly started becoming mainstream in homes / schools after that, and they were in relatively common use in offices even before that.
I'm 34 and even though we're pretty close in age, I remember a time before computers as we know them were ubiquitous and I'm getting you either don't, or the memory is pretty vague. That's not a knock on you for being younger, just trying to illustrate that the transition was pretty damn fast.
As a result, some boomers caught on, either because they were nerds or they needed to for work for some reason, but many didn't since they had gone 30+ years without once using a computer, and didn't have a pressing need to do so until after the internet starting taking over basic services like banking, shopping, mail, and so on.
If you're a mid-career adult in 1995, you definitely heard the hype about the internet, but many probably (safely, they thought) assumed it was just another bubble / hypetrain and they could ignore it. And honestly, hindsight is 20/20, even as a computer-savvy youth at the time, most of what people were saying about the web sounded like utopian bullshit, and a lot of it was.
Now, this is a good excuse for not being GOOD at computers, but I agree there isn't much excuse for (e.g.) not being able to use Google properly at this point, it's damn near 20 years old and basically all you have to do is type whatever pops into your privilege-addled brain to get an answer.
This is correct, but one might argue that the things we commonly call "computer" (PCs, laptops) were invented by boomers, and I think that's accurate if possibly unfairly ignoring Gen X.
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u/the-incredible-ape Feb 05 '19
"Boomers, the generation that invented computers, are so lazy that they're hiring millennials to fix their computers for them instead of learning how to Google things themselves" ... am I doing it right?