I had an odd experience with my past computing memories about 7 years ago.
We’d just hired a new guy after his masters. I guess I am older than him by say 5 years.
I grew up on command line dos, hacking around on config.sys and similar to reconfigure the “extended memory” (above 640 kB) to get say, Tie fighter to run with gouraud shading and stereo sound, little tasks like that kept me burrowed into manuals and using the dos shell as a kid, just before the Win 3.1 era. After becoming a teenager I ended up not touching a computer for maybe 10 years, so the dos shell was always this thing I hacked around on as a kid.
Fast forward to seven years ago, and our new hire has never seen the dos shell (cmnd prompt/whatever)
So I am explaining how to navigate, commands to issue etc. and it’s the weirdest thing, reaching into my childhood to tell this guy about some work related particulars here and now. It kind of did feel like he missed out on something good.
Then again he was probably hacking together a website at similar age and wonders what in the world we did growing up a few years before.
The fact that I think you're a philistine going with Gourad over Phong shading is something totally incomprehensible to that person that came five years after you.
I feel like my relationship to computers vs. newer generation is very much like my parent generations relationships with cars vs my own. My father in law can tell me about every car he's owned, upgrades made to it, etc. Similarly, I can recall every PC I've built, as well as all of the incremental upgrades along the way.
At this point in my career, I've directly managed close to 100 different software engineers, and only a handful are terribly interested in the inner workings of the machines they use. For them, they're tools, some better than others, for doing the job.
We’d just hired a new guy after his masters. I guess I am older than him by say 5 years.
I grew up on command line dos, hacking around on config.sys and similar to reconfigure the “extended memory” (above 640 kB) to get say, Tie fighter to run with gouraud shading and stereo sound, little tasks like that kept me burrowed into manuals and using the dos shell as a kid, just before the Win 3.1 era. After becoming a teenager I ended up not touching a computer for maybe 10 years, so the dos shell was always this thing I hacked around on as a kid.
Fast forward to seven years ago, and our new hire has never seen the dos shell (cmnd prompt/whatever) So I am explaining how to navigate, commands to issue etc. and it’s the weirdest thing, reaching into my childhood to tell this guy about some work related particulars here and now. It kind of did feel like he missed out on something good. Then again he was probably hacking together a website at similar age and wonders what in the world we did growing up a few years before.